Hostinger: the domain registrar that was already there

Every website needs an address — a domain name like yourname.com. Hostinger is where I bought mine. Not because it's the best option, but because it's where I happened to register the domain. Its only job is to point visitors to the right place: Vercel, where the actual site lives. Think of Hostinger as the street sign and Vercel as the building.

Your domain registrar is the one piece of infrastructure you almost never think about — until it breaks. It controls your web address, which means it controls whether people can find your site at all. The good news is that once it's set up correctly, there's nothing to do. Point your domain to your hosting provider, let the security certificate auto-generate, and forget about it. The bad news is that the initial setup involves some confusing networking terminology that trips up a lot of people.

Buy your domain from any registrar (Hostinger, Namecheap, Cloudflare — they all work). Then go to your hosting provider (Vercel, in my case) and add your domain. It will give you a couple of addresses to enter back in your registrar's settings. Paste those in, wait anywhere from five minutes to a couple hours for things to propagate across the internet, and your site is live at your custom domain. The hosting provider handles the security certificate automatically.

If you already have a domain on Hostinger, there's no reason to move it. It works fine for the one thing it needs to do: point your domain somewhere else. If I were buying a new domain today, I'd probably go with Cloudflare for the lower prices and faster setup. But honestly, for a simple 'hold my domain and point it at Vercel' setup, any major registrar gets the job done.