If you recently bought a domain name, I bet you can’t wait to set it up. The excitement is always overwhelming. I too just bought one. No more novicemaster.blogspot.com. Yeah I have it set up at www.novicemaster.com. Doesn’t the later look more professional and poses a higher level of credibility? That is what we have been talking about since this series began.

What is the point here? You probably want

1. your blog to be available via your new domain name
2. your blog to be available via your old domain name
3. visitors that reach your blog via your old domain name to be taken to your new domain name.

There are various means of achieving at least two of the three objectives above, and the method you would chose strictly depends on “the state of your blog” (you will understand what I mean by this in the next few paragraphs).

DNS MANAGEMENT

This is highly recommended for someone who wants to start a self-hosted blog.

Let’s say you want to start up a self hosted blog using Wordpress, for example. Self hosted means you will have to sign up for a hosting account, free or paid. Your host will give you DNS settings (Nameservers) that you would attribute to your domain name through your domain registrar. Most, if not all hosting providers will put a sign next to your addon domain name telling you its DNS status.

Now, add the domain name to your hosting account (as an addon domain, and allow from 24-48 hrs for it to be set up. After that, you are ready to install Wordpress and start blogging. Most hosting providers, if not all, will display a message near your domain name telling you if the nameservers set up are correct. Normally, you need at least two nameservers.

ZONE RECORDS

This method of attributing a domain name for a blog is very important is your blog is remote hosted, ie, hosted by an online service like blogger. If your blog is a .blogspot blog, then using your domain name for your blog would be as easy as just setting up a type of zone record called CNAME. A CNAME is just like “another name for”. If you are using blogspot, the CNAME for blogspot is ghs.google.com. Creating a CNAME for your domain name, in lay terms, means telling your domain name to search blogspot (ghs.google.com) and locate any blog that has your domain name attached to it on the publish settings of the dashboard.

The help section of Google has an extensive article to demonstrate how this is done, using various examples for different domain name registrars. If your domain name registrar is not on that article, I recommend you use this other article compiled by my humble self, which I assume is more general and down to earth.

Do not worry. If properly done, you won’t lose any traffic.

Consider reading the following articles

• AZ – BLOGGING – Using A Custom Domain for Your Blogspot Blog
• BLOGSPOT HELP - How do I use a custom domain name on my blog?
• BLOGSPOT HELP - How do I create a CNAME record for my custom domain?

URL FORWARDING and REDIRECTION

This method is recommended if you already have a self hosted blog and you do not want to migrate the entire blog to your new domain name. What you actually would have to do is redirect your domain name to the old one. Using an online redirection service is ok, but I will recommend you do it yourself. Placing a file on the root of your blog will do the job. Third will require you to go to the folder in your file manager that has the index file of your blog.

This article provides an easy method to manually redirect one

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