On setting up a new domain... Cheaply! (Part 2)

So, I have a domain, but where can I point it?

The first thing you need is an IP Address for the base hostname - ie patrickmcneil.ca. This is an A Record, and usually I would just point this at my house.

Well, I just discovered that godaddy offer free web hosting with a domain name purchase! This actually seems pretty decent - they give you 10Gb, 300Gb/month transfer, php support and 10 MySQL databases. With that, I should be able to set up anything I could want.

At this point, I have the option to set up CNAME Records, this is where you can redirect a subdomain to any hostname. ie cats.patrickmcneil.ca could redirect to icanhascheezburger.com.

This is where google apps comes in. This allows you to create CNAME records to redirect subdomains to google services. They support mail hosting, website hosting, blog hosting via Blogger and more. Through this, I've set up mail.patrickmcneil.ca and blog.patrickmcneil.ca. I also set up main.patrickmcneil.ca as a test of google sites, but I doubt I'll use it.

Now - e-mail. In order to make @patrickmcneil.ca addresses work, I need a mail server. Luckily, google supports this too. All I have to do is set my MX records to point at the google servers, and I have the gmail interface for @patrickmcneil.ca. A lot of companies do this, including mine - Phidgets Inc.

I would probably stop there, except that I just signed up for a 2 month trial of MobileME, and it supports custom hostnames too, so I pointed www.patrickmcneil.ca at a mobileme website that I created in iWeb.

Anyways, a bit complicated, but there you go - free hosting, and a domain for basiclly free.

-Pat

On setting up a new domain... Cheaply!

I've never had my own domain. The reason is simply that I haven't wanted to spend the money. I've had plenty of dyndns.org domains, which are free, and I've used those to alias my IP for remote desktop logins and such, but never my own domain name.

And then I realized: If I want a specific domain, like my name, and it's gone, I'm out of luck - and it's true: www.patrickmcneil.com is taken.

And THEN I realized: domains are only about $10/year! That's nothing! My idea of not wanting to spend the money originates about 10 years ago when domains were actually expensive and when I didn't have a credit card so I couldn't have gotten one anyways.

So anyways, I hopped on over to godaddy.ca and registered patrickmcneil.ca. It's $12/year and I got a 10% discount with the code DIGG1 (from the Diggnation podcast of course).

Now of course I need to deal with hosting for the new domain - basically you need a webserver somewhere that you point the domain at and host files/blogs/webpages/a mail server, etc.

I don't want to pay for hosting services (at the absolute minimum it's ~$5 a month and good ones start at ~$30/month - which gives you your own machine). My ISP (Shaw) doesn't want me to point my domain at my home IP address, and it's not static anyways. So what to do? Well I'll talk about that in my next post...

Starting

I'm just starting a new BLOG at my new domain - patrickmcneil.ca

It's pretty exciting to have my own domain.

-Patrick