If you want to start a blog on a real website or if you want to become a professional blogger, the first thing to have is a personalized domain so that the internet address of the site where the blog is located is of the type www.claudio .com without blogspot or other strange words. Many people think that having a site with a custom domain is also necessary to buy hosting and switch to a CMS some Wordpress.
Nothing more wrong; you can also have a custom domain on blog platforms such as Tumblr.com and Blogger.com that do not require you to pay any hosting server .
Buying the domain means getting a personalized address while hosting is nothing more than the online space in which to save the files that make up the website, which is free in Blogger.
The purchase of a domain name does not cost much, 10 Euros or less and offers a whole series of advantages, including the possibility to earn money with the blog.
UPDATE: With blogger you can buy a Google Domains domain
Blogger.com is one of the most complete platforms for creating a blog that can be customized in all respects.
Although less easy to use than Tumblr and Wordpress.com, Blogger, completely free, is the online service that leaves more freedom to edit, which does not display external advertising that does not include paid accounts and which favors the insertion of Adsense advertisements by Google (even Blogger is in fact Google).
Until recently, anyone who had a blog with a blogspot address could buy a custom domain directly from the blog settings, on the Blogger.com site, by paying Google for the purchase.
By purchasing the domain with Google for the blog blogger, in addition to the address of the domain without a .blogspot, you received a free account of the Google Apps, the applications for business management.
Since Google has now eliminated free Google Apps accounts, it has also removed the ability to quickly and directly purchase the domain for a Blogger blog.
To add a custom domain to Blogger and have an address for the site like www.navigaweb.net (therefore not www.navigaweb.blogspot.it) it is therefore necessary to go to an external site and buy the address .
See the guide to choose the address and name of the site to quickly find the names available.
To buy the domain name you can go to an Italian provider such as Aruba or POP.it or, better still, to GoDaddy which is recommended by Google for Blogger and which guarantees maximum reliability.
As seen in the guide on how to put up a website in half an hour with a second level domain, go to GoDaddy.com, write the address you want to use for the blog, go ahead and buy it by pressing the Buy It Now button.
Pay by credit card (also PostePay) the required 13 Dollars, fill in the information (name and surname etc.) and confirm by registering also the management account.
Once the domain is obtained (the story also applies to domains already bought in the past), it must be configured to make it work in Blogger .
This procedure which was previously automatic and managed by Google itself, must now be done manually.
In any domain name provider (the registrar) in which you have purchased the customized site address, there is a panel for managing the DNS parameters that are the ones that interest us.
For example on GoDaddy.com, after logging in to your personal account you need to launch the domain control panel (domains) and then enter the DNS Manager section.
In GoDaddy's DNS Manager (but this applies to any other provider), for the configuration of Blogger you need to create 4 new A records and one CNAME record.
The 4 A records (like hostname put @) are:
216.239.32.21
216.239.34.21
216.239.36.21
216.239.38.21
The CNAME (Alias) record must point to ghs.google.com (like aliasing to use www).
Note: With GoDaddy there is also an automatic configuration procedure for Blogger.
Go to the site //www.godaddy.com/blog/bloggerdnssetup.aspx to login and activate it to configure all the parameters without having to write them manually.
Note2: Before doing any configuration, when you go to the Blogger settings, press Add a custom domain and then write the new address a screen opens asking to add two CNAMEs: one the one ghs.google.com and another which is self-generated by the googlehosted.com platform (without therefore touching the A records)
Then follow the instructions and the links that lead to the guides to create the CNAME records on some domain providers.
For new domains it is better to wait 24 hours before doing any configuration.
Once the configuration is saved, go to Blogger to set up your custom domain . Then open the control panel on Blogger.com, go to the Basic Settings and press, in the center of the page, under where the blogspot site address is written, the link Add a custom domain - Address your registered domain to your blog .
write the new address purchased and then save.
After saving, click the Redirect domain.com option to www.domain.com so that the blog can be reached even without writing the www .
From now, typing the custom domain on a browser, the blog that was previously on the Blogspot domain will open.
Each new post and all the articles already published will be on the new address and there will be a 301 redirection from the old URL to the new custom domain (thus avoiding indexing problems in the search engine)
In case of problems, you can test the correct DNS configuration of the provider (the registrar) by typing the domain name on the online tool //www.kloth.net/services/dig.php.
If you know English, every possible problem with custom domains can be solved by consulting the nitecruzr English blog which is part of the support of the Google Blogger service.
READ ALSO: How many things you can do with a custom domain
