Most of you might be using the blogspot domain for publishing your blog posts. If you wish to publish your posts onto your own domain you can use
a)the custom domain option or
b)the FTP Publishing option
As i mentioned earlier, the FTP publishing has some disadvantages. So i would suggest you to go for Custom Domain Hosted with google.
So how does this actually work?
When you opt for custom domain publishing you can continue making posts from blogger.com using the same interface and editor. But your posts will be published at your domain name.For this you don't require a hosting account.Blogger will host the blog for you just like your ordinary blogspot blog.
How to Set this Up?
Follow these Steps if you don't have a hosting account at Host Gator or similar trusted Hosts
No Hosting Account
1)Login to your Domain Control Panel
2)Opt for DNS Management
3)There opt to create a CNAME Record with NAME= www and DATA =ghs.google.com
This CNAME record will help you to setup a blog at http://www.yoursite.com
Now if you are planning to blog on a subdomain rather than the main domain then you will have to modify the CNAME record. ie if you were to blog at http://blog.yoursite.com then you should have created the CNAME record with NAME=blog and DATA=ghs.google.com
4)Now Skip over to the Common Steps Part from (5)
Now what if i have a Hosting account at Host Gator or Similar sites
If you have a good host,then your host can easily do this task for you.So if you have a good host then follow these steps
1)First make sure that your host can manage DNS for you(you wont see any such option in your hosting control panel,but hosts like hostgator do provide this service on request).If your host does't then you will have to opt for the other option above.
2)Now just email your host and ask them to create a CNAME record for you.
If you are to blog at www.yoursite.com ask them to create a CNAME with NAME=www and DATA=ghs.google.com
If you are to blog at blog.yoursite.com ask them to create a CNAME with NAME=blog and DATA=ghs.google.com
3)Once they reply to you telling that they have made the CNAME record for you,login to your domain control panel and change your nameservers of your domain to that of your hosting account. In case of hostgator it will be something like NS1620.HOSTGATOR.COM or so..
4)Now follow the Common part steps from (5)
Common Steps for Both Methods
5)Now everything is almost ready.Now goto your Blogger Settings >Publishing Tab
6)There you will find an option to publish to a custom domain
7)when prompted enter the address where you want the blog published.If you had made www cname then enter www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com there.I will suggest you to use www.yoursite.com .If you are blogging on a subdomain and had created a CNAME with NAME=blog then enter blog.yoursite.com
8)Now just save the settings and have a look at your blog.
9)If you don't see your blog there don't panic. It could take some time for the DNS changes to reflect over to your ISP
10)Now comes the tricky part.If you are using godady as your domain provider then it comes with free hosting(offcourse they will show ads).And in Case you opted for the second method then you can use your hots's hosting.Now if you are blogging at the root domain www.yoursite.com, then you should create a redirect page which will redirect http://yoursite.com to http://www.yoursite.com
This means that http://yoursite.com will be hosted on the server whose nameserver you provided in the Domain Control Panel.Godaddy by default will have its nameservers set to theirs.So in the hosting account just create an index.html file with the following content
(yea blogger has an option to redirect yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com but that didn't work for me.
In Brief here are some facts
CNAME www ghs.google.com => you can blog at www.yoursite.com
CNAME blog1 ghs.google.com => you can blog at blog1.yoursite.com
CNAME blog2 ghs.google.com => you can blog at blog2.yoursite.com
But you can't have both http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com both at the same time..
You can have multiple blogs on different subdomains of yours.
Additional Notes:
You might have seen a Missing files host option in the publishing tab.A missing files host specifies an alternate location to look for your files in case there are broken links(files missing)..
I hope this tutorial is of use to you guys.If you still cant figure this out,contact me and i will help you in setting this up..
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