The Real Blogger Status

Not all blog owners, who publish blogs outside the BlogSpot address space, have any feeling for the complexity of the DNS infrastructure . We see the questions periodically in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . My readers are still reporting seeing the well known problem 404 Server not found or I added the "CNAME" for my domain, and I'm still seeing another old friend (not) Another blog is already hosted at this address. when I try to publish the blog to the domain. or I added "blog.mydomain.com" to my domain, and published to it with no problem, but some readers are seeing 404 Server not found Why some - but not all?

This blog is " blogging.nitecruzr.net ". If I wanted to dress it up a bit, I might tell you it's " Blogging.Nitecruzr.Net ". Either URL should work, equally well. That's not the case with all blogs, today. Here's an example - "mydomain.com". A normal DNS configuration, per an excerpted Dig log . MyDomain.com. 3600 IN A 216.239.32.21 MyDomain.com. 3600 IN A 216.239.34.21 MyDomain.com. 3600 IN A 216.239.36.21 MyDomain.com. 3600 IN A 216.239.38.21 www.MyDomain.com. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com. --- ghs.google.com. 32316 IN CNAME ghs.l.google.com. ghs.l.google.com. 300 IN A 74.125.43.121

Custom domains, to the typical blogger, should be incredibly simple to setup. Functionally, the setup process is two simple steps . Create a DNS entry for the URL of your choice, pointing to Google. Publish the blog to the URL. But for all of that simplicity, they are seemingly random in their failures. Why are custom domains so apparently randomly unreliable ? One example, where we can see random behaviour, is in surgical DNS changes. One of the recent causes of the flood of Another blog is already hosted at this address. and Server Not Found Error 404 is a reference to a DNS server that isn't in service any more . Many bloggers, lately, complain of the "Server Not Found Error 404" symptom. I'll look at an HTTP Access Log for the domain, and see Host IP address = 66.249.81.121 followed by <h1>Server·Not·Found</h1>(LF) <h2>Error·404< /h2>(LF) Next, I look at an excerpted Dig log for the domain, and see mydomain.com. 3600 IN A...

Since the Google Custom Domain product was made available to eager bloggers, there has been a well known limitation - the inability to get both "www.mydomain.com" and "mydomain.com" to redirect to the same Blog*Spot blog. I've been writing about this limitation since March 2007, a couple months after Custom Domains was launched. That limitation was resolved in October, 2007 . But the ability to make "mydomain.com" == "www.mydomain.com" brought more uncertainty. Not all DNS Hosts support "CNAME" referral, of both the primary domain ("mydomain.com") and a subdomain ("www.mydomain.com"). Yet that referral is essential to the success of custom domain use. When you setup your domain, the domain setup wizard (provided by your DNS host) should provide you with two lists - "A" and "CNAME". All direct references ("Hosts") go into the "A" list, and all others ("Aliases...