How to Shift to Blogger's Custom Domain

After learning how to verify or authenticate one's blog, there are still a number of little things that a newbie blogger needs to know and do for his/her blog. But I have decided to defer talking about these things for now because I can see from the Official Blogger Help Group site that, despite the numerous explanations already published there, one of the most complained-about topic remains to be how to successfully shift from a Blogspot blog (a subdomain) to a "custom domain" (or a URL/address owned by the blogger). This is my take on the "custom domain" issue, based on my own experience. Before I proceed, however, here are a few clarificatory words.

First, this post is limited in its application to the Blogger platform.

Second, although I could have acquired my domain name thru Blogger and registered it through a Google partner, I have decided to source it from GoDaddy.com after some preliminary Web research. As such, the step-by-step procedures that are discussed here pertain only to domains parked with GoDaddy.com. Having had no benefit of actual experience with domain names parked with other hosts, I can't tell how different or similar the procedures are when one shifts from Blogspot to a custom domain.

Third, what most step-by-step procedures about shifting to a custom domain lacks is a simplified overview on what the whole exercise is trying to achieve. This is superfluous for a techie, but quite basic to a non-techie who is trying to do this himself for the first time. I wish somebody taught me this on my first attempt. Anyway...

Blogger's "custom domain" feature is like having your cake and eating it, too--a normally impossible feat in the real world, but only made possible by Google. With this Blogger feature, you can enjoy the respectability of blogging from your own URL or personal blog address without the attendant monthly costs of a hosted blog. This magic is achieved by having a domain "parked" with GoDaddy.com (free of cost if you bought it from them) and "pointing" (take note: I didn't say "forwarding", because that's a different matter altogether in the Internet world) that domain or address to a Blogger/Google server, which is your "host". Thus, all the procedures below are intended to "point" your "parked" domain to your cost-free "host." On that note, here we go:

1. Login to your GoDaddy account:












2. Click on the My Account link:











3. Click on Manage Domains to open the Domain Control Center:











4. In your list of domain names (assuming you have more than one parked in GoDaddy), click on the domain you wish to substitute (as "Custom Domain") for your present Blog*spot sub-domain:





5. Click on the Total DNS Control and MX Records link, located just under Nameservers in the mid-portion of your screen:









DNS stands for "Domain Name System", a system which allows the translation of a human-readable hostname (ex: Typhoon.com) into an IP (short for "Internet Protocol") address of the form 208.77.188.166, to enable the delivery of digital data over networking equipment.

An MX or "Mail Exchange" record, on the other hand, is a type of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS). Each MX record contains a "priority" and a "host" name, so that the collection of MX records for a given domain name point to the servers that should receive e-mail for that domain, and their priority relative to each other.

6. Set up a CNAME referral for the alias www by clicking on Add New CNAME Record (found at the right portion of your screen, below Add New A Record):








CNAME is short for "canonical name" record. It indicates the true, or canonical, host name of a computer that its aliases are associated with. A machine or a computer can have an unlimited number of CNAME aliases, but a separate CNAME record must be in the database for each alias.

6. Fill up the CNAME (Alias) form:

Before you fill up that form, let me just digress a little bit to the concept of "domain name," which most tutorials on custom domain presume you know. According to Google Apps: Domain names are easy-to-remember names (URLs and email addresses) that are associated with one or more IP addresses. Since a web page is defined by its URL, the page can move to a different IP address without affecting visitors. If we have "www.typhoon.com" as the domain name, "com" is called the top-level domain, "typhoon" is the second-level domain, while "www" is the subdomain, third-level domain, alias or CNAME.

Having said that, type "www" on the space provided for "Enter an Alias Name" and "ghs.google.com" on the space provided for "Points to Host Name," then set the "TTL" using the dropdown box. I don't know with you, but I kept the "TTL" at the default setting of 1 hour, which means that's the time increment for which the server should cache the information. Once you're done with the form, click OK. (In case the "www" alias is rejected, if you already have several domain names under the same GoDaddy account--like what happened to me recently--use your second-level domain in place of "www", e.g., "typhoon.com" in the above example)










7. After successfully completing the CNAME referral process, you can now delete the A-Record by clicking the highlighted button shown below, before logging out of GoDaddy:







8. It's time now to set up Custom Domain by logging-in to your Blogger blog , going to the Settings tab and clicking the Publishing link:











9. Click the Advanced Settings link in the Custom Domain Page, since you already own a domain parked with GoDaddy:

















10. Type your Custom Domain (which is parked with GoDaddy and by now pointed to Google's server) on the space indicated, then click Save Settings, as shown below:























11. After saving your Custom Domain successfully, check the Redirect box (which I highlighted), then click Save Settings:





















Bloggers who shift to Custom Domain very early on, when they still have not published much, could practically confirm right away if they did the whole process correctly by clicking on the View Blog link, and checking their Browser's address box. The address displayed should correspond to the Custom Domain. For older blogs with plenty of published posts, however, it may take longer. According to Google Apps, it could take as much as 48 hours for the Custom Domain to substitute for the Blogspot subdomain.