Your Business Email plan can't send or receive mail until your domain points to WHC. There are three ways to get there. Which one suits you depends on whether this domain currently runs a website, and where you'd like your settings to live.
No website on this domain right now. Point the whole domain to WHC and we handle the rest. One change.
Your website is hosted somewhere else, and you want to leave it there. Add five DNS records by hand. Nothing else about your domain changes.
Your website is hosted somewhere else, and you'd rather manage everything in one place. Move your domain's settings to WHC first, then point it here. More work up front, simpler afterwards.
Not sure? Take the second option. It works in every case and it can't take anything offline.
Before you start
You need:
An active Business Email plan on your WHC account.
The login for wherever your domain is registered. If it's registered with WHC, that's your Client Area. If it's registered elsewhere, you'll need to sign in there.
If this domain currently receives email somewhere else (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, an old host), that mail stops arriving once you switch to WHC. Move or export anything you want to keep first.
No website on this domain right now
The quickest route. You change your domain's nameservers to WHC's, and WHC creates the DNS records your Business Email plan needs — the A, MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records — and keeps them current. Changing the nameservers is the only step.
Set your domain's nameservers to:
ns1.whc.ca
ns2.whc.ca
ns3.whc.ca
Where you change them depends on where your domain is registered:
Registered with WHC — see how to change your domain's nameservers.
Registered somewhere else — sign in to that company's control panel and look for a nameserver, NS, or DNS setting. Enter all three.
WHC doesn't change nameservers on your behalf, so this step is yours to make. For the full list of WHC nameservers by service, see what are your DNS (or nameservers)?
This doesn't stop you having a website on this domain later. If you add a WHC hosting plan down the road, your site and your email both run from here and none of this needs redoing.
Only take this route if there's nothing else running on this domain. Changing your nameservers replaces your domain's entire DNS setup with WHC's. Any website, subdomain or third-party service on it stops working until those settings are rebuilt here. If you have a website anywhere — including with WHC — use one of the two options below instead.
Now skip to Confirm it's working.
Your website is hosted somewhere else
Your domain is already doing a job, so instead of handing the whole thing to WHC, you'll add five DNS records — A, MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC. They point only your mail at WHC and leave everything else exactly as it is.
The A and MX records tell the rest of the internet to deliver your domain's mail to WHC. SPF, DKIM and DMARC prove the mail you send is really yours; without them a large share of it is filtered as spam. All five are required.
Step 1: Get your record values from cPanel
Two of the five you build yourself from your own domain name. The other three you copy out of cPanel.
Log in to your Client Area.
Click Email in the left sidebar.
Click Manage next to your Business Email product.
Click the cPanel logo at the top of the page, next to Renew. cPanel opens in a new tab.
On the cPanel home page, find the General Information panel on the right. Copy the value under Shared IP Address — that's the server address your A record needs.
Scroll to the Email section and click Email Deliverability.
Click Manage next to your domain. cPanel shows a suggested SPF, DKIM and DMARC record, each with a Name and a Value.
Use the Copy link under each field rather than retyping. These values are long and the text is cut off at the edge of the box, so a record typed by hand is easily incomplete.
The DKIM value is the longest of the three, and cPanel offers a Full and a Split view of it. Copy the Full view first. If the next step refuses it for being too long, come back and copy the Split view instead.
Step 2: Add the records where your domain's DNS is managed
That's wherever your nameservers point, which isn't always where the domain is registered:
Your domain uses WHC's nameservers — add the records in the Domains tab of your Client Area. See how to update the DNS records (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV) for your domain for the exact screens.
Your domain uses someone else's nameservers — your registrar, Cloudflare, or your web host — add them in that company's DNS interface.
Replace yourdomain.com with your own domain name throughout. Add them in this order: the MX record points at mail.yourdomain.com, and that address only works once the A record exists.
# | Type | Name | Value | TTL |
1 | A |
| the Shared IP Address you copied from cPanel |
|
2 | MX |
|
|
|
3 | TXT |
| the SPF value from cPanel (starts with |
|
4 | TXT |
| the DKIM value from cPanel |
|
5 | TXT |
| the DMARC value from cPanel (starts with |
|
cPanel shows the DMARC record's Name as just your domain. Don't copy that part. The record only works if its name is _dmarc.yourdomain.com.
Record 1 does a second job: it makes mail.yourdomain.com work as the incoming and outgoing server when you set up your email on a computer or phone.
With your DNS at another provider, your mail app won't find these settings on its own — you'll enter the server names by hand. For more on how SPF and DKIM affect whether your mail reaches the inbox, see how to increase the email reputation of your domain.
Step 3: Check for conflicts before you save
An MX record pointing at another email provider. Replace it — don't add a second one beside it. If the old record stays, your mail can keep going to the old provider, where you won't see it.
An existing SPF record — a TXT record starting with
v=spf1. Don't add a second one. A domain can have only one; when there are two, mail servers treat the check as an error and both stop working. Merge WHC's values into the record you already have.A Name field that already ends in your domain. Some DNS interfaces add
.yourdomain.comfor you. If yours does, enter only the first part —mail,_dmarc,default._domainkey— and leave the field empty (or enter@) for records that sit on the domain itself.
Moving everything to WHC
Worth considering if you'd rather not keep two sets of settings in two places. Your website stays where it is and keeps running — what moves is your domain's DNS, the list of settings that tells the internet where to find each part of your domain. Once it's here, your mail records are maintained for you, and any future change is one login instead of two.
This takes more work up front than the option above, and there's more to get wrong: the previous option only adds records, while this one replaces the whole set. Anything you miss stops working. Take it if you want everything in one place, not to save time today.
Write down every record you have now. Sign in to your current DNS provider and list all of them — not just the website. A and AAAA records, CNAMEs, any TXT records verifying you to Google, Microsoft or anyone else, subdomains, and any other MX record. Screenshot the lot.
Recreate them in your WHC DNS zone. Every record from step 1, with the same names and values. Your website's A record keeps pointing at your current host's IP — that's what keeps your site up through the switch.
Add the five mail records from the table above, in the same zone.
Change your nameservers to
ns1.whc.ca,ns2.whc.caandns3.whc.caat whoever your domain is registered with.Check both. Once DNS has propagated, load your website and send a test email in each direction.
Don't change your nameservers until every existing record is recreated at WHC. The switch takes effect all at once: anything missing from the WHC side goes offline the moment it does.
Confirm it's working
DNS changes usually take effect within a few hours, and can take up to 48. See understanding DNS propagation for what affects the timing.
Once they're live:
Create at least one email account on your domain, if you haven't already — see how to create and manage email accounts.
Send a message from an outside account (Gmail, Outlook) to that address. Confirm it arrives, and check the spam folder too.
Reply from your Business Email account back to that outside address. Confirm the reply arrives and isn't marked as spam.
Both directions matter. The first test tells you mail is reaching WHC; only the second tells you your outgoing mail is being trusted.
If nothing arrives after a few hours: if you changed your nameservers, confirm all three saved correctly. If you added records by hand, compare each Name and Value against what cPanel shows under Email Deliverability — one missing character in an SPF or DKIM value is enough to break it.