Tag Archives: verio

Blogger.com troubleshooting – ghs.google.com IP fix

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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.

Check your hosting plan!

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Some of us – I’m a good example – can be too stubborn about hassling with technology changes because I know that with technology stuff you always can expect the unexpected.   However sometimes this costs me a lot more than the value of the stress it saves me.

I’ve had many hosting plans for many sites over the years and it has been nice to see  the costs come way down from the old days.    

I’m just now switching my Verio shared hosting plan from the $50 monthly to the $13 monthly, and it looks like I’m getting better features at about a quarter of the cost.    Also switching my Godaddy “virtual dedicated” server plan, which I was not all that happy with anyway due to SMTP problems neither they or I could solve.    That plan still allows me to have many domains on the server, but cost is going from about $40 monthly to about $16.   

About five years ago I think I was paying something like $800 per month for a dedicated plan, and over at US History I think we may still be mistaken to run our own servers with all the associated costs for bandwidth and maintenance, but that system would be hard to untangle right now.

The morale of this story is simple:    Regardless of the size of the site you run you should review your hosting plan to make sure you are taking advantage of the new very inexpensive options available from most hosts.   Also, I think it’s a mistake to assume that the “elite” hosts are better than the cheap ones.  Virtualization (running one physical server as several virtual servers), IP sharing, and load balancing, and customer service quirks mean that the cheap plans can be *better* than the more expensive ones, even at the *same host*. 

Verio was very helpful *after* I asked them about options for reducing my costs, though they would have earned much more customer loyalty from me if they’d recommended a switch a few years ago when they changed my server but didn’t let me know I should be switching to the cheap plan.