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Office 365: Verify Third-Party Domains

Before you can license Office 365, Microsoft has to verify your domain to make sure that you are the domain owner. Since your domain isn’t registered through Bluehost, we can't take care of the verification, so you'll need to take a few extra steps so Office 365 can verify your domain through your domain’s current registrar. The simplest way to make that happen is to go to your domain registrar and point your domain’s nameservers to Bluehost.

Information about Nameservers

Every website has an IP address, which is how computers look them up. But to make it easier for us humans, we use domain names instead. Nameservers tell the web where to find the domain names, and then the DNS (Domain Name System) converts domain names (like “www.example.com) to a machine-readable IP address (like 22.231.113.64). Think of it like the contacts in your smartphone; you enter a name, and the nameservers and DNS database turn that name into a number, so you get to the right site.

When to point your Nameservers to Bluehost:

After you purchase Office 365, we'll walk you through the steps to point your nameservers to Bluehost. After you have pointed your nameservers, it may take up to 72 hours for that change to update across the web (usually, it’s faster, ~8-12 hours for most US-based customers). The time needed for DNS updates is called Propagation.

If you have other products reliant on DNS records through a different domain registrar, pointing your nameserver to Bluehost will not transfer those records.

Reasons why you may not want to point your Nameservers to Bluehost:

You may not want to change your nameserver to Bluehost if you have a live website hosted somewhere else or plan on hosting your website elsewhere. Pointing your nameservers to us may take your live site down. If you do not wish to point your nameservers to Bluehost, Office 365 may not be the right product for you at this time.

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