I want to use gmail as my email hosting provider. I signed up for the free trial and it asks me to verify that I own my domain.
The verification methods include adding some specific entries to the DNS records. How can I do that? I only own the domain but do not have a hosting provider. My domain control panel only has 4 boxes where I can enter the nameservers of my hosting provider (the boxes are empty since I don’t have one).
What should I do?
You need to have a Nameserver , which has your DNS records.
you do not need to have a webserver.
You must have the DNS zone hosted on a DNS server… and then be able to add that record to verify to gmail that you are an admin of the domain
You must have the domain name 's name to ip address data defined on a nameserver in order to use the domain for email… so its not gmail creating a requirement that is unusual or ‘extra’.
What to do ? Well you don’t even pay for a web server
perhaps your domain name registrar can provide DNS data hosting for free or a small upgrade to the registration fee ???
or perhaps you need to pay for web hosting, as long as you get free DNS hosting with it…
If all you need is DNS hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.net offers it for pretty cheap: less than $4 a year, or even less if you get other (equally cheap) services with them.
You can also transfer your domain name to a registrar to includes DNS along with registration fees. It’s odd to have a registrar NOT include this, so be sure to check with yours first to make sure you don’t already have it.
When you registered the domain name, they didn’t ask you for your name servers then?
Your Domain Register doesn’t offer Domain Name hosting? You really do have a domain name, but no domain name server?
Just checking.
If you didn’t already have the domain name, you could ask Gmail to register it for you, and they contract with a Domain Name hosting company, and that also automatically takes care of the authentucation.
It turns out this particular ISP provides DNS hosting only with web hosting. Registering a domain gets you only that, do DNS hosting.