How to: move your blog to a custom domain

Difficulty: Intermediate
Time: 1 hour (approx)
Cost: 10 US$ (approx)

This is for all users who are on blogger, and wish to migrate to their own domain.


For example, I used to have the blogspot domain syzygial-scorpius.blogspot.com but now it is mayankmrug.com.

Understand what we are doing here, that is, the blog and all the content is still hosted by blogger, but we now have our own name to get to the site instead of something.blogspot.com.

The first step would be to register your own custom domain, which can cost around 5 to 20 US $ per year.

Google itself does give an option to register a domain through a Google partner for 10 US $ per year, alongwith a free subscription to Google Apps.

Buy a domain for your blog through Google (under Settings->Basic)

If you do not want to try Google's partner (I did not) you can register through the variety of web hosting providers available. I did it through Netfirms who had a sale on domain names so it cost me 4.95 US $ with Domain Privacy for free. Domain Privacy basically means that, if you try to find out who is the owner of this domain by doing a WHO IS search, you will not be able to.

Once you get the domain and activate it, the first step is to change certain settings in your hosting provider's cpanel :

Go to Domain Settings click on your domain name and change the DNS records. You need to give a new alias (CNAME) with the host name as 'www' and the destination/address as 'ghs.google.com'.

Then you need to add A-records. This part is optional but I recommend you do it because this will make sure that, even if a visitor types the site address without 'www', he reaches the site.

Enter your domain name in the format example.com, and list the I.P. addresses shown below in the "A" section. You'll need to create four separate A-records which point to four different Google IPs.

216.239.32.21
216.239.34.21
216.239.36.21
216.239.38.21

That is all the setting you need to do on your hosting provider. There may also be an option to point to another url, but don't do this.

Now you need to change blogger publishing settings (under Settings->Basic->Blog Address). It is recommended that you wait for an hour after registering a new domain. Even if you do try to save this setting before that, it might not work.

You just need to write your new domain name (with 'www') and remember to tick 'Redirect to..' so that it redirects even when users write the naked domain name.

The new domain name should now be working. If it is not, and you think you have done all settings correctly, you should know that it may take upto a day or two for it to work.

Your old blogspot domain name will now redirect to the new domain too.