On January 21, at 2 a.m., I sent money to my ASPone account, and it was credited the following day at exactly 3 a.m. – that was precisely when I received the email confirming the credit top-up. So I could have registered the domain right away, but I waited a bit longer so I could consult Pavel about the domain name and ask the ASPone technicians whether I would be able to point a .net or .cz domain to my blog.
I didn’t expect any problem, but I hadn’t looked carefully in the client section – I had only checked the Domain list, while what interested me most was under “DNS record management“. So this morning, after getting up at 11:20, I chatted with Pavel for a while and then sent him a file in which I had listed potential domains – with their downsides, what they could mean, and whether they were available with the .NET and .CZ endings. For example, for this domain, jepsano, I had written the following:
Name: jepsano
CZ available: No
NET available: Yes
Meaning of the domain: The “ano” (“yes”) at the end may mean amen to some people. Otherwise, the domain is suitable mainly for Biblical content, especially the New Testament, because Jesus often used this phrase (“it is written”). It is also quite a good domain for a blog – I can say, tongue in cheek, “It is written on blog.sunamo.cz“. “Sano” is a bit reminiscent of sunamo. So it is a kind of double meaning 😀 . To find where in the Bible the words “it is written” appear in a single verse, click 👻 This domain has switched off its wifi for good.
Downsides of the domain: Only the .net variant can be registered, and .net domains are more expensive.
In total I had between 10 and 15 domains written up like this – I don’t have the exact count. On my first call to ASPone, I wanted to know whether it would be possible to redirect a new .net or .cz domain to Blogger, and as I mentioned above, they pointed me to the DNS record management in the Client section, which I hadn’t noticed until then.
I assumed the domain would show up there on its own, so I thanked them and hung up. I could already see it in the domain list, but not in the DNS record management. At the bottom there was just a note saying “Note: If the zone file for an already registered domain is not listed here, we will gladly add it to the list – just contact us.”, so I called them again to ask whether the DNS file would appear there after some time, or whether they would have to create it for me. Once again, their intervention wasn’t necessary, because all I had to do was click the Add new button, then choose from a template, and there it was. By 12:20 (exactly one hour after I woke up), I already had the domain registered and could edit the DNS records.
I wasn’t very confident with all the settings, so I also looked up other guides on setting up a custom domain on Google. In my blog settings I entered the domain www.blog.sunamo.cz and clicked Save. Blogger then gave me further settings that I had to enter as my DNS records – one CNAME with the name www and the address ghs.google.com., and a second CNAME with a specific code and a longer address, also ending with a dot. The dot wasn’t shown there, but you have to enter it in the DNS record. I deleted all records except the NS ones and created new ones in the ASPone CS according to the information on this page: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/1233387?rd=2&visit_id=639231085132706393-2271283654#ts=1734115 + according to the data Blogger showed me.
Then I just activated replication of these new DNS records to the ASPone DNS servers, and one last thing – below that I checked “Redirect blog.sunamo.cz to www.blog.sunamo.cz” in Blogger and clicked Save. I tried whether the domain was already working (although I had been warned everywhere that it could take up to 24 hours), and it really was working already – such speed shocked me. The only downside is that something like blabla.blog.sunamo.cz doesn’t work, only plain blog.sunamo.cz and www.blog.sunamo.cz work, and both addresses then appear with www.
After that I also registered a new account in GAnalytics, and now I just hope I didn’t buy this domain for nothing – because of the huge differences in traffic between GAnalytics and Blogger, where the figures differed roughly 10x.