My Experiences Registering a Domain though GoDaddy

Announced yesterday around 10:52 pm EST, I wrote about Techman's World getting its own domain.  Today I'm going to talk a bit about how the process was going. I didn't take pictures for the most part to protect my personal information.


The first thing I did was visit Jupiter Broadcasting to grab the affiliate code. The code was buying a new domain for $5.99 for 1 year. After clicking the link to get the affiliate discount, I want ahead and searched for my domain, techmansworld.com. I already knew it was available from a few weeks ago, but I waited until now.

I choose to start doing domain migration at night because that is when (according to my stats) I get the least amount of viewers. Also, I think DNS servers have less load on them at this time. Surprisingly, all DNS changes took about 20 minutes to an hour. Some changes took 20 minutes, some took longer.


Since my site is still being hosted by Blogger, I did not have to purchase hosting. WordPress is still in my mind, though.

To add your domain to Blogger using GoDaddy, follow these steps:

1. Click My Account from the GoDaddy home page.
2. Under the domains area, expand it and select your domain you want to change
3. Click "Launch" to launch the domain manager
4. Scroll down to the bottom where it says "DNS Manager"
5. Under CNAMES, change the "www" value from @ to ghs.google.com.
6. Go back to Blogger, go to Settings > Basic. Under in that area, around the middle, you should see an area that says "Publishing". Click the link to add your domain. Enter your domain, making sure that "www" is in front of the domain. In this case, make sure you entered www.example.com instead of example.com, because the host is set for www.
7. Once you do that, click ok. If you get an error with Blogger stating that it can't resolve your domain, then look at my paragraph below explaining what to do.
8. You should be set.

Now after those steps, you have to do one last thing. You have to make sure that people who visit "example.com" get redirected to "www.example.com." to do this, navigate back to the tab or window that contained the domain dashboard for your domain. At the top, there should be a forward button. Click it, and select "Forward Domain". At the HTML popup, enter your domain name again, but this time with the www. before it.. Click ok or save, and you should be set.

Now if you get an error stating that Blogger can't resolve your domain, then thy might tell you to add a CNAME to your do main. You should already have the www CNAME set to the value "ghs.google.com" The other CNAME will vary, but it is a set of letters and numbers. This is for Google to verify your domain, probably after the recent disabling of the feature. They did say that they disabled it for security risks, so maybe now you have to verify your domain in order to use it with blogger. If you still need help with this,  contact me and I'll help you out.

GoDaddy does explain that changes to DNS settings can take up to 2 days, but usually all changes are set in about 1 hour or less. Try accessing your blog within the hour to see if the changes are working. If they aren't then once again, give it more time. If it is taking longer then what you think it should take, then try contacting GoDaddy support to see if they can help you out.

Here is some images that I took that can help you. These images are provided as is, and GoDaddy's user interface can change at any time.

If you wish, you can click the images to view them larger.