How to point a custom (np) domain to blogspot

I have been struggling for quiet some days about pointing my .np domain to blogspot.com website. I also want it to open without having to type www in the url. I succeed in my quest. How? Well thats a good question and here's how it happened.

You can do it in four steps.

• Get a domain(eg. rajanu.com.np)
• Get a blogger account in google(eg. rajanprasadupadhyay.blogspot.com)
• Point the domain to your blog (*.blogspot.com)
• Configure your blog to use this domain name.

 

Get a domain

A domain is basically a string or text (eg. google.com, facebook.com) that points to an IP Address. There are so many domain name providers from whom, you could get a domain that you desire and that is available. For my purpose, in my country Nepal, Mercantile solutions provides one ccTLD(country code top level domain) free of cost for personal use. Do the following to get a free np domain if you are a Nepalese citizen. But you are not limited to a .np domain for using blogspot with it.

1. Go to ther Website to register a new np domain(domain name should contain your name)
2. Drag create a user and provide all details
3. Upload a png or jpg format file copy of your citizenship.

You will have a domain when you receive a mail from them informing that your domain request is approved.

Get a Blogger Account

Now the second step is to create a blogger account, and then a blog. If you don't have a google(gmail) account, create one. Then go to the blogger and create an account. Create a blog with any domain url you want. By the way, blogger is a free blogging platform provided by google. Whats cool about it is

•  Its free
• Its secure
• It has amazing content creation interfaces
• Statistics
• Integrable with adsense
• Beautiful templates available, also free, customizable

and lots more.

Google is not going to host your blog in separate dedicated server. Instead, it maps your blogs url to your blog. That means request to any blogger blog, goes to the same(group) server. Then its resolves the content based on your url. It is important to understand it because you are going to configure it to resolve your blog with custom url.

If you already have a blogspot blog that you want to point to, ignore this step.

Point Domain To Blog

If your domain provider has provided you with the options to create C-NAME and A-RECORDS, you could use that. But for here, I am using a free dns provider. A c-name is a record which points to another domain name and a A-record is a record which points to an ip address. Go to the free dns provider and create an account. Click on the domain link and create a new domain. Give the name as yourdomain.com.np . Make it private and then save it. Your domain is created with just a MX record. Click on subdomain and create four subdomains of type A-record for your domain with Destination field as 216.239.32.21, 216.239.34.21, 216.239.36.21, 216.239.38.21 respectively.

You are done with the A records creation.

Configure your blog

 Now the last thing to do is to configure your blog to use your custom domain. Go to the advance settings of your blog and check the "publishing" section. Add a custom domain, fill it with WWW.yourdomain.com and try to save it. First it will throw an error with instruction of two C-Name type records that you should create. Again go to your free dns provider and from sub-domains, create two subdomains of type C-Name with the fields that google had provided you(ghs.google.com with subdomain www, *.googlehosted.com with subdomain provided by google). Save all the changes. It may take one to a few days for the DNS information to propogate to the system.

final domain settings

Now, try again to save the settings in the blogger.

Now in a few days time, you should be able to access your blog by typing www.yourdomain.com.np in the browsers url. But it will not work, if you just type yourdomain.com.np on the browser. You have to do one extra setting. Go to the blogger-> settings and under the PUBLISHING section click on "EDIT". You will see a checkbox which is an option to redirect url's like yourdomain.com.np to www.yourdomain.com.np. Check the checkbox and save it. Now you could access your blog with the url yourdomain.com.np .

Congratulation, you have made it.