[wplug] domain question

Will Rodina wrodina at gmail.com
Fri Jul 18 23:06:37 EDT 2008


I recently did all this, so it's still kind of fresh in my brain. :)

I got my domain through GoDaddy, it was something like $8.99 for a
year. Once you have a domain under your control, you need to add DNS
servers to use (though most registrars will provide a "coming soon" or
other parking page for you). I have used ZoneEdit for a few years now,
and I like them very much. They are free for up to 5 domains; they
also offer paid-for services. One nice thing, I have Verizon DSL which
filters access to port 80. ZoneEdit provides a feature where I can
have www.mydomain.com transparently alias to another URL of my
chosing, such as www2.mydomain.com:81. Thus, a visitor to the site
would see "www.mydomain.com" in the title bar and not realize that it
is on an alternate port. May not be an issue if your ISP doesn't block
port 80.

Not sure about failover services, you'll probably need to pay for that
separately if you want the site to be identical. For that matter,
though, you could just pay for the hosting and let them worry about
the uptime. :)

I use Google/Gmail as the SMTP provider for my domain; works like a champ.

Feel free to respond with more specific questions if you like.

- Will

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 6:17 PM, Zach Uram <netrek at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wanted to get my own domain but I've never done it before. I guess I
> go find a domain registrar and pay around $20 and the domain is mine
> for a year. So once I have the domain how do I set it up so that if
> someone goes to www.mydomain.org it will automatically redirect them
> to http://my-public-ip and I want the URL bar to only show
> "www.mydomain.org" and never the IP of my webserver. Will I have to
> run my own DNS servers? Never did that either. Also what if my machine
> goes down (I run low end SDSL, power outage or whatever reason), how
> can I set up the domain so that if my IP is down it will automatically
> send them somewhere else such as http://my-backup-ip but still show
> "www.mydomain.org" ? Running Ubuntu. Later I would like to add mail
> services but for now I'm just worried about setting up a domain for a
> web presence.
>
> Zach


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