Monday, November 17, 2008

New Custom Domain

So... I've changed the domain name for my blog. The new address is http://www.agawebs.com/ and the new name is AgaWebs. Sounds cool, doesn't it?

For those of you who plan on performing a similar stunt, note that it's not as straight forward as you might think. I, for one, had a bit of trouble with this migration and though I should share the things I've learnt...

Let's say you're in the same situation as I was: you own a Blogger (or Blogspot) blog, you buy a custom domain from GoDaddy and want to point it to your blog. First thing you'll do is read Google's guidelines for moving a site. You'll then read Blogger's help articles on using a custom domain for your blog and creating a CNAME record for the domain. After following the instructions in these tutorials, you'll be tempted to think it's all over and wait for DNS servers to update their records. I've done so myself and noticed that after 72 hours, the domain still wasn't pointing to my blog. Here are the full instructions I received from GoDaddy Support in order to fix this:

Dear Andrei,


Thank you for contacting Online Support.

I understand you have a question about pointing your domain name properly to your blog. I have included instructions to do so:

1. Modify the 'www' CNAME to show that it 'points to' ghs.google.com. (you have already done so.)

2. Set the 'A' record to the forwarding IP address (64.202.189.170)

3. Set up domain forwarding to the following URL: http://www.agawebs.com

To modify the A-Record for the your domain:

1. Select Domain Manager from the My Products menu.
2. Click on the domain which you wish to change the A-Record for.
3. Click Total DNS Control and MX Records.
4. Under the A (Host) section, click the pencil icon to the right of the @ record.
5. Enter the new IP address.
6. Click OK

NOTE: Changes to the settings of a domain can take up to 48 hours to become effective because of the number of networks involved, and because these networks are controlled by several different agencies. This delay applies to all domains with any Registrar. Please allow for this delay when planning web sites or configuring a domain to work with your services.

To setup or modify domain forwarding:

1. From My Products, click Domain Manager.
2. Check the box next to the domain(s) you wish to modify.
3. Click the Forward Domains button above your list of domains.
4. Select the Enabled option.
5. Enter the full URL that you would like your domain to forward to. (For example: http://www.anotherdomain.com)
6. Select the redirect type you would like for the domain forwarding.
7. Click OK.

Note: Changes to the settings of a domain can take an average of 48 hours due to the number of networks involved. These networks are controlled by many different entities and are updated independently.

Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way.


Sincerely,

Dean P.
Online Support Technician

As you can see, Blogger's tutorial is missing at least one crucial step: setting the 'A' record to the forwarding IP address. I'm not sure if the IP is the same for all domains, so do contact the very helpful GoDaddy Support staff before performing these steps. Note that domain forwading (the 3rd step mentioned in Dean's email) is used in order to make both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com point to the same site. This can be performed from Blogger's admin panel as well - it's the "Redirect yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com" option under Settings > Publishing. However, using this option can cause further problems, so I recommend you stick only to the instructions above.

That's the full story of my new domain. I still have to change some of the links on this blog and make them point to the new addresses. By the way, if you come across any broken links or other bugs, please notify me in a comment. My Outbrain star ratings have also been reset, so please start rating again, bookmark the articles you like and subscribe to the new feeds.

Thank you for visiting my blog :)

6 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Thanks for sharing! I have been trying to figure out how to forward my domain to www.domain for blogspot also. It looks like the answer was right in front of me. I guess the forward button kept getting lost in the sea of endless options on every page.

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  3. Yeah, Jason... Basically, I think there's something wrong with the redirect option in Blogger's admin page - it just doesn't work.

    Thanks for the comment.

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  4. Hello Andrei

    Thank you for sharing your expertise on so many subjects - and you write very clearly, making these tutorials very easy to follow.

    You probably know about XENU - but in case you don't it will sniff out all of your broken links, and very quickly, too.

    You can get XENU here:

    http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

    The guy who wrote XENU is (I think) a genius - and happy to share his expertise. You have much in common with him!

    Regards from the UK


    Martin

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  5. In case you are wondering - I mentioned XENU because at the foot of your post you wrote:

    I still have to change some of the links on this blog and make them point to the new addresses. By the way, if you come across any broken links or other bugs, please notify me in a comment...


    Bearing in mind the age of this post, you may not otherwise see that my referral to XENU is not off-topic...

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  6. Nice... I didn't know about XENU. I'll probably give it a try. Thanks for sharing and thank you for your kind words.

    Cheers,
    /andrei_aga

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