My other main blog is www.howtosavetheworldforfree.com, which has been running on paid for hosting for several years. However, Blogger is about to shut down its updating by FTP functions, so I thought it would be a good time to let the hosting lapse (it ran out last week) and move the blog to being hosted by Blogger.
My hosting may have ended, but I still have my domain registered with the same company for another year. I’ve logged in to their DNS management page and, following Blogger’s own instructions, made changes to the CNAME record which should point to hosting on Blogger. Except nothing’s happening, so I can’t complete the move to Blogger.
I’ve obviously misunderstood something. Could somebody who understands DNS have a look at the instructions and tell me whether I’m right to have created a new CNAME for the www subdomain or if I should be doing something else entirely.
The thing about DNS is it’s a distributed architecture with caching servers all over the world. This means that a change you a domains master DNS records could take up to 24 or even 48 hours to work its way through to you. Your computer caches the old records and your ISP caches the old records, each one could have a cache TTL of a few hours (ie it’ll keep telling you the old answer for hours before it checks to see if the answer has changed).
Basically what I am saying is that you will need to have a bit of faith in the instructions and make the changes then wait for a couple of days. You can speed things up a little bit by clearing the DNS cache on your own computer (use ipconfig /flushdns if you’re using windows) but there’s nowt you can do about your ISP cache except wait.
I first changed the DNS info over a week ago, and still no change (I’m waiting for Blogger to recognise it so I can continue the migration). The old hosting company, who are still the domain registrars, don’t seem to want to have anything to do with it. Maybe I should just shift registration completely to Blogger/Google.
You’re missing a period at the end of your CNAME. It should be ghs.google.com. with the trailing dot included.
That seems to have done it. Thanks.
I just wish the Blogger instructions could have made that trailing dot more obvious.