How To Setup BlogSpot Custom Domain
BlogSpot.Com is a free blogging plateform where you could start writing with absolutely ZERO budget. However, its major drawback is the address of the blog wich going to take a sub-domain name under the default "blogger.com" domain, so that your blog looks like "myblogname.blogspot.com".
At any given time you will need to setup your custom domain while keep using their free hosting service with all its features to edit and manage posts .. etc.
In this post, i'll tell you how to use a custom domain rather than the default blogger domain to point to your same blog under BlogSpot plateform..
Part 1 : Buy a custom domain
First of all, you need to purchase a custom domain from another domain registrar company like GoDaddy, or NameCheap. A domain will cost usually $11 but it could be more or less depending on the extension and the company you go with.
Part 2 : Link your Blog with the purchased domain
When you make sure you have your custom domain ready, it is now time to link it with your BlogSpot blog. This going to take some few more steps. Make sure to follow them precisely.
Step 1: Add domain as an address to your blog
You need to define the newly purchased domain as an address for your blog so that BlogSpot recognise it later on when we point it to their servers. To do that, go to your blog dashboard then go to Settings > Basic . Locate the "Blog Address" option under the "Publishing" section.
Click "+ Setup a 3rd party URL for your blog" link in order to enter the address of the domain in the next given form.
Make sure to enter it with "www" in front like shown in the above screenshot. Then hit the "save" button.
After that you will get an error saying "We have not able to verify your authority to this domain. Error 12". That's normal and we can skip it as we are going to manually setup things. The most important information we need here is the next one which give the CNAME record that we need to configure.
Having these CNAME records, we can go back to our registrar domain manager (ex:GoDaddy) and will configure those informations to our domain follwing these steps. Here i'll give screenshots from the GoDaddy domain manager. If you use another registrar the screen may looks diffrent but the options are quite the same.
Step 2: Configuring the domain
GoDaddy domain configuration
Choose the domain from the list. On the next page click the "DNS Zone File" tab.
Click "Add Record" then from the pop-up window select "CNAME (Alias)" option from the first dropdown. Enter "www" in the "Host" text input and "ghs.google.com" in the "Point to" text input. Select "1 Hour" from the "TTL" dropdown list. Your final form should looks like this :
Once Okay! hit "Add Another" button and it will bring new form to add another CNAME record. This time we are going to add the second one that we've got from blogspot "Blog Address" setup above. Which consist of a random string as a host. Make sure to copy/paste it from the blogspot page to avoid typing errors.
Click "Finish" and then click "Save changes".
Now we are done with configuring the CNAME records. Let's configure the A record.
Click again the "Add record" link like before. Then choose "A (host)" option from the first dropdown list. Enter "@" as a Host and use this IP address "216.239.32.21" in the "Point to" text field. Your final screen must look like this :
That's not all :) You need to repeat this step for the follwoing other 3 IP addresses:
216.239.34.21
216.239.36.21
216.239.38.21
Once you add them all, you must have 4 A record saved in your domain DNS file and your screen will look like this :
When everything is OK, you need to wait from few minutes to few hours to changes to take place. Back to BlogSpot and click "Save changes" button.
When the domain configuration globally spread out. Google will take care on the redirection and you will start to your old blog address redirected to the new custom one!!
If you have trouble following the steps, please leave a comment under this post and kindly help you solving the issue. If you enjoyed this post share it to your friends :)
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