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This is quite a common topic to come up - wanting to use a custom host for a blogger blog. My personal reasons are due to issues concerning iframes, SEO and the specific address of the blog.

I have the custom domain already, and I am familiar with the necessary steps to use it with blogger (quickly outlined in such resources as http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Your-Own-Domain-on-Blogger.com)

My question relates to the manipulation of the DNS administration.

I do not actually know what the A and CNAME records do. Moreover, the step requiring the CNAME record attachment of ghs.google.com produces an error, as it conflicts with a previous CNAME record already listed (duplication of records). I could delete this extant, conflicting record, to attempt to solve the problem - but I would be doing so blind and may consequently move from what is a slight inconvenience, to a very serious headache. I am also wondering if there is any security risk in this pointing operation, as I have seen no mention of it either way so far.

One final issue, albeit one which I am not overly concerned about, is whether this pointing could interfere with other pages in this domain (if I opt not to use a subdomain).

Perhaps I am not entirely understanding the process: how will the address of the blog change if the location of its files (and therefore the blog itself) does not?

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A record is an address<->IP mapping. Lets say you have example.com domain name and 1.2.3.4 ip address.

First you add an A record for example.com pointing to "1.2.3.4" Now, if you want to ping example.com, your pc resolves example.com's A record and gets the 1.2.3.4 IP, and pings that IP. So when you open serverfault.com, your PC first asks your DNS for an A record for serverfault.com, gets its IP, and sends the request there.

If you want www.example.com to point to the same server as example.com, you can add another A record (with the same IP) for www.example.com. Or, to simplify things, you can just add an alias (CNAME), so www.example.com points to example.com

Of course, if you already have an A record for example.com, you cannot add a CNAME for the same domain (the DNS wouldnt know what to return, so it doesn't allow this).

When your browser connects to example.com, in the headers, it also sends which domain it's accessing. So you can have multiple websites (site1.example.com and site2.example.com) on the same server (same IP), and the server checks the header to see which site you actually wish to access.

You need to add a CNAME for your domain (e.g. blog.example.com) which will point to ghs.google.com. When someone opens that url, it will first be told that it's a cname, and then it will connect to ghs.google.com and send a request for blog.example.com. Google will see that request, see it's your domain (that's why you have to set it in the blogger control panel), and return your blog. All of this happens in the background ofcourse, the user just types your address, and sees your page.

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  • Thanks for the reply. ... Ah right! So I'd probably want to use a subdomain then (blog.example), as I would want to have my own .html homepage at example.com. If I understand you correctly, if I deleted the current CNAME at example.com and replaced it with the ghs.google.com, it would/could only work as a routing device! I am still surprised, however, that if you type in example.blogspot.com it is replaced by example.com and not the other way round, as ultimately the files are still on the blogger host.
    – user137263
    Jun 20, 2012 at 15:57
  • yes they are, but example.com also points to bloggers host (same device behind them if you point your example.com cname there - it's like a house with two addresses :))
    – mulaz
    Jun 20, 2012 at 21:05
  • As a final addendum - I'd say then that the existing CNAME at example.com is pointing at example.com/index.html ... whilst it would probably be possible to use folders in order to have blogger pointing and web-hosting being done simultaneously at the same location (I hypothesise) it would likely be an awkward process. I'm glad I didn't jump in head-first in that case!
    – user137263
    Jun 21, 2012 at 9:03

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