Can I get an address with no www to work with godaddy?

August 8, 2007 5:06 AM

I've bought a domain with Godaddy. I would like the http://mydomain.net (with no 'www') to go to my site, except it doesn't, it goes to a parked page. How can I change it so it goes to the same place as typing http://www.mydomain.net? (I'm not an idiot, but for these purposes, I might need it spelled out).
posted by minifig to technology (11 comments total)

Is GoDaddy hosting the site, as well? Is GoDaddy providing DNS for you?
posted by stovenator at 5:42 AM on August 8, 2007

No, it's a blog, and blogger are hosting it. The blogspot address forwards to the full address with the www in it, and the site works if you have the www at the front of the address, I'd also like the version without the www to work.
posted by minifig at 5:53 AM on August 8, 2007

Ultimately this is an issue for whoever you're using for your domain's nameservers. One thing I am a fairly sure of is that setting it up a record for a non-prefixed alias like that requires you to use a wildcard A or CNAME entry - there's no way to specifically set up a non-prefixed entry, you can only do a wildcard redirect and then as desired set things like mail.example.com and www.example.com as exceptions to the wildcard entry.
posted by Ryvar at 6:02 AM on August 8, 2007

Some domain registrars will give an URL forwarding service that you might be able to use to cause http://mydomain.net to redirect to http://www.mydomain.net. This would probably be easiest if you have this available to you already, though it is a little more traffic and some registrars put stupid ad-based redirect pages making it not something you want to do.

If you want to deal with DNS, you probably want an A record on mydomain.net so that you can have an MX record for it (and then make a CNAME for www.mydomain.net).

DNS is kinda convoluted. A record = direct name to IP address mapping. MX record = mail exchange record so you can say mail to mydomain.net should be handled by mail.mydomain.net or whoever handles your mail. CNAME record = a name to name alias.

Your domain registrar will tell you who the primary nameserver for your domain is. You're probably paying whoever that is, so it would be good to know. It might be GoDaddy.

Once you find out who it is, you'll need to get them to help. A lot of registrars have web interfaces for managing DNS. In its simplest, you want to have an A record for mydomain.net pointing to the IP address of your hosting service. Then you want a CNAME for www.mydomain.net pointing to mydomain.net. This will make both http://mydomain.net and http://www.mydomain.net work for you.

If they allow it, you can setup a wildcard CNAME so that *.mydomain.net is an alias for mydomain.net as well. This means toast.mydomain.net and harrypotter.mydomain.net and anythingelseyoucanimagine.net

Finally, if someone is handling your mail, you want an MX record for mydomain.net to whoever is handling it for you.

I don't know how blogger hosting works, but the web server needs to expect being accessed in this way as well. Some places will redirect one to the other so that going to http://mydomain.net will automatically redirect to http://www.mydomain.net.
posted by cmm at 6:26 AM on August 8, 2007

For what its worth, I have a domain with godaddy, but they also host it. For me, mydomain.com goes to the same page as with www.mydomain.com, and I never did anything special.
posted by letahl at 7:36 AM on August 8, 2007

Like everyone says, you need a nameserver address from blogger or blogspot, or whoever owns the physical space where the data for your web site lives. It's a number that will look something like 69.96.1.123

Start an account somewhere like ZoneEdit, which is free, and set the IP address of yoursite.com to the nameserver address.

Then login to your GoDaddy account and set the
DNS/Name Servers to whatever the two NameServer addresses that ZoneEdit provided were.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 7:42 AM on August 8, 2007

1. Log into your Godaddy acocunt.
2. From the dropdown menu Domain Names, select Manage Domains.
3. Click on Domain Forwarding on the left menu.
4. Click on your domain name.
5. Click on Enabled and enter in the "Forward To:" box www.whateveryourdomainis.com.
6. Select Redirect Type 301 Moved Permanently
Save.
7. Click OK.
posted by Blue Buddha at 7:51 AM on August 8, 2007 [1 favorite]

Alternatively, you can go to TOTAL DNS CONTROL (godaddy's name, not mine) and set up an A record for this. Use '@' (no quotes) for the hostname and the IP address as the IP address. Then you can set up a CNAME for www to point to @ so both forms of the URL will work.
posted by rhizome at 9:36 AM on August 8, 2007 [1 favorite]

Right. CMM:

I've found where I can manage the DNS in GoDaddy, it's in the thing mentioned by rhizome "Total DNS Control". However, the control seems pretty far from total since I can't set either a wildcard DNS subdomain, or, as far as I can tell, just leave that box blank.

Croutonsupafreak:

Does the fact I can fiddle around with my DNS settings change your opinion, or is it still worth me doing what you say?

Blue Buddha:

Thanks, but it doesn't seem to have solved the problem.

rhizome: the only thing that Google (Blogger) have given me to direct to is "ghs.google.com", which is what the "www" points to. I can't change the @ address (the A Host, I think) to letters, it won't accept them. But I'll see if Blogger will give me an IP address instead.

In related news, I also just got this in response to my question from GoDaddy themselves:

Dear minifig,

Thank you for contacting Online Support. You will need to modify the A record and setup a forwarding address to your blog account so you can properly forward your domain name. Please follow the directions below to accomplish this:

First, log into your customer account:

o Select 'Manage Domains' in the Account Manager
o Click on the domain you wish to Forward (Setup an A-Record) for
o Then, in the middle of your screen, click the link that says 'Total DNS Control And MX Records'
o Click the box with the pencil on the top right next to your current IP host A record, then enter the IP address **.***.***.*** [this, incidentally, is a different IP address for the one that was there already, mf] for the 'Points to IP Address' and click 'Save'.

Please allow up to 24 hours for the Zone File to be updated with this new information. Your domain will then physically point to the IP address entered.

To forward your domain, follow the directions below.

First, log into your customer account:

o Select 'Manage Domains' in the Account Manager
o Click the box to the left of the domain you wish to Forward
o Then click the icon above your domain names that says 'Forward'
o Click the 'Enabled' button and type in the complete URL in the 'Forward to' box that you would like to forward your domain name to.
(ex. http://www.anotherdomain.com). Then click 'OK'

Please allow up to 24 hours for the Zone File to be updated with this new information. Your domain will then physically point to the IP address entered.

Please let us know if you require further assistance.

Regards,

****** A.
Online Support

Which doesn't, to me, seem to solve the problem, or am I being really stupid?

Thanks for all your help so far people, I'm learning an awful lot about DNS in a short period of time, from a zero start-point, and your guidance is proving very useful!
posted by minifig at 10:06 AM on August 8, 2007

A lot of times, using * as the name will do wildcard DNS in those web interfaces, but I've not used the one you are using, so who knows. If you're most interesting in getting mydomain.net and www.mydomain.net working, you don't even need to worry about wildcards. It might be best to get that going first before worrrying about the general problem.

If all you get from blogger is a hostname, it might be best to use CNAMEs. I'm fairly sure MX records can't resolve to CNAMEs, so if you have someone handling your mail, you might be better off making a mail.mydomain.net A record and then pointing your mydomain.net MX record to that. If you're not going mail, ignore all the MX stuff.

DNS takes awhile to propagate around. There is inherently a lot of caching going on and changes have to go up down a hierarchy of servers before it eventually gets updated most places. This is what they mean by the "Zone File" getting updated. The local server needs to update its local Zone File and then zone transfers over time will propagate the change across other servers.

If the web interface you are using exposes something called TTL (time-to-live) that is what this is. It hints at a timeframe that a caching DNS server should trust their cached value before having to go back to asking someone else again. Some places set small TTLs so you'll see results faster. But a lot of web interfaces to DNS don't allow you to set TTL since it is a pretty advanced thing and you can cause a lot of traffic by setting it too low when really DNS doesn't change that often.

More than likely, you won't see results immediately with DNS changes.
posted by cmm at 10:27 AM on August 8, 2007

CMM: You're absolutely right - it all seems to be working now, I was just being impatient.

Thanks to all of you for your help!
posted by minifig at 10:38 AM on August 8, 2007