Blogger.com troubleshooting – ghs.google.com IP fix
Posting a blogger.com fix I just struggled with for some time. This sounds more complicated than it is but I could find little online to help me, so hopefully I’ll save somebody future time with this post.
I wanted to run my Airports Blog as part of AirportCityCodes.com, hosted at Verio. Blogger (owned and run by Google) has a great IP redirection feature that lets you run a blog off your domain by creating a CNAME record that directs to ghs.google.com and accesses your blogspot blog. Normally this works fine, but Verio’s DNS system will reject ghs.google.com because it in turn is an alias for ghs.l.google.com. Verio claimed that Google using improper DNS protocol by telling people to use ghs.google.com.
The blogger fix at Verio is to use this: ghs.l.google.com.
Note the period at the end which is needed at Verio to keep them from appending your domain name to the record.
If this does not work, or at some other registrars (Network Solutions was mentioned somewhere), I think you’ll want to use the IP address for ghs.l.google.com which is this: 72.14.207.121
I hope this works for you, and if not let me know as I use this feature for many blogs and I’m always interested in Troubleshooting tips, especially for blogs.
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Thanks for the Verio tip – I ran into this too.
Wow, thank you, sir! The IP worked with Network Solutions!
Thanks so so much! I’ve being looking for such tips for a long time! Thanks!
[...] Here are the directions for a free blogger blog. This is for domains hosted at Godaddy but similar will work at most registrars except for Verio where you’ll need to use the IP and not ghs.google.com [...]
Pingback by Free Google blog at your own website? Priceless. « Joe Duck | May 24, 2008 |
HI,
I have bought a domain from verio and when I try to create CNAME on it to be used with blogger, I keep getting “Invlalid CNAME error”. Do you have any idea why it could be? Help would be much apperciated
Bad record:XXXcom. 86400 IN CNAME ghs.l.google.com. Invalid CNAME
[...] I followed the instructions, but Verio doesn’t allowing mapping a CNAME to a domain that also redirects to a CNAME as I found out from this blog post. [...]
Pingback by Uri Blackman » Blog Archive » Wordpress.com blog on Verio | June 11, 2008 |
I called and comfirmed:
Verio’s help system revealed that they don’t allow CNAME
records to point outside of the local domain. You need to pay them 10 more a month to make this happen.
Time to change hosting companies.
having a MONSTER of a time attempting to get a clients page [http://speakertreerecords.com] to redirect to a masked page that I will host. if anyone can help me remove the entire GOOGLE beast that is holding onto the webpage – please help.
thanks!
kaleb@sctas.com
Kaleb do you mean masking using 301 redirection? Reconsider that because Google does not like masking and it could hurt their search ranks.
The Network Solutions SOLUTION!
I had such a horrible time trying to get my domain name at Network Solutions to work as my custom domain on blogger that i thought i should share the secret sauce.
The solutions is to NOT use a CNAME redirect to ghs.google.com on the network solutions end but INSTEAD add an ip address to the www and to the @ “A” record.
The ip address to use is: 74.125.93.121 (google’s ip address)
To recap:
In your DNS control panel at network solutions you should see a box called “IP Address (A Records)”
Under the “Host” column you should have “www”, “@ (None)” and “*(All Others)”
You want to enter 74.125.93.121 under the “Numeric IP” column for “www” and “@ (None)”
DO NOT add a CNAME entry in the box below it (if you did… delete it).
That all folks! – should take about 2 hours to be all set.
FYI the reason you have to do this is because Network Solutions thinks it’s big and clever to be a pain in the a$$, they think that google has it wrong… which them might do but they should be focused on helping their customers, not on corporate one-upmanship.
I happened to stumble upon this thread looking for something else, but I thought I’d give some information.
The DNS spec is very specific about what a CNAME can and can’t be.
1) You can’t have a record that has a CNAME, and ANY OTHER TYPE of record. This means you cannot CNAME your domain name itself, since you are required to at least have an SOA record.
2) You can use a name that has a CNAME record in any other record (i.e., you can’t point your MX records to a CNAME). HOWEVER, the EXCEPTION is in another CNAME – CNAMEs CAN be chained.
So, for some of the problems above, I believe Netsol (and I hate saying it) is correct – you cannot at the CNAME to your base domain, but Verio is wrong if they are claiming it is violating rule #2, but correct if they are saying it violates rule #1 – but what Google does with ghs.google.com doesn’t matter at that point.
I tried JoeDuck’s fixes with Verio and talked to their tech guy. Nothing worked. He finally said that the ghs.l.google.com. and all the other variations of that weren’t —- whatever. Not proper or whatever. I’m not a computer person. I suggested the IP address as an “A” deal instead of CNAME. That didn’t work either. Has anyone talked to google about this? The Verio tech guy said that if I got the IP address google was using for my site, that’s the only thing that would work.
HELP!!
Thanks! It worked for me too!
i created a site in google named”http://sites.google.com/site/(site name)thereafter i purchased a domain from godaddy the domain is parked with godaddy. the question is whether i can use my domain to view the site i created with google?
if yes, please let me know the settings that i have to make and where?
Ashu
I guess I’m joining the bandwagaon.My client, too is hosted with verio and we want to subdomain their blog but can’t. I find it hard to believe that with such a common practice for SEO that verio has not come up with an alternative.
All the threads refer to google….Any advice for subdomaining WordPress blogs with Verio?
I too am having an issue registering my google blog account through Verio. None of the suggestions here so far work, I either get INVALID DATA, or INVALID CNAME back from their config tool. I’ve got a ticket in with them so hopefully we get it resolved
I am facing this problem too. WordPress.org is much easier to work with on the installation using custom domain and hosting. Experimenting on Blogger now to try out different blogging platforms.
Thank you interesting read!
how do i undelete my blog’s custom domain??please help…
Daniel usually that happens if you didn’t pay Google the money and all you need to do is pony up, but you’ll need to provide a lot more detail here. Is this a blogger domain?
yes its a bloggers domain…so,could it be retrieved??
I accidently deleted the blog’s domain and right now when i tries to go to my domain,an error appears “The requested URL / was not found on this server”…i couldn’t view it…is there any way to i could undelete it?
Daniel short answer is that I don’t know, but Google should have a recovery procedure for this type of accident. Posting at Google forums as you have is good but give more information there like the URL, the blogspot URL, when this happened, etc.
If you have a backup of the site you may just need to re-establish the name as you did when you set this up.
Was there a blogspot URL, e.g. kaosrockshop.blogspot.com?
Daniel this is an odd message from kaosrockshop.blogspot.com suggesting you may be redirecting the blogspot domain incorrectly – check that:
You’re about to be redirected
The blog that used to be here is now at http:///.
Do you wish to be redirected?
im having problem to view the blog that was previously created..could anyone let me know how to retrieve my blog??
I just want to host my regular domain via blogspot hosting, but I need to know two name server I found only one ghs.google.com
I need one more, Any help?