Using Blogger for Custom Top Level Domain

We can host blogs with blogger with our custom domains in two ways.

In the first method, we need to enable ftp server on our domain, and give our credentials of ftp server to blogger. Whenever we post anything, blogger publishes the files in our ftp server.

By this way, the blog would be delivered from the hosting server of the domain. All the restrictions on bandwidth, disk space etc. would apply according to the hosting server.

In the second method, we need to set CNAME record for our domain to ghs.google.com. Once, it is set, google hosts the blog at their servers. For my site, I set CNAME for blog to ghs.google.com.

In this, the bandwidth and disk space restriction would be of google. I don't think there is any bandwidth restriction for google. For images, it uses picasa, and picasa has a limit of 1 GB. For text, I don't think there is any limit.

If you want to setup blog for your top level domain, and want to use other facilities like email, then it becomes little tricky. If your provider allows to set CNAME just for top level domain, then there will not be any problem. But, most of the providers including godaddy do not allow to set CNAME record for the top level domain. If we set A Record, then we lose control on all the mails.

For that, I have done the following (for www.loksattavideos.com). This works for Apache server.

I used my own hosting for the top level domain (loksattavideos.com).
For mails, I had my custom MX records.
I setup CNAME record for www to ghs.google.com. It means, google hosts my blog on www.loksattavideos.com.

In the home directory of my hosting server for loksattavideos.com, I created one .htaccess file with the following content.

Redirect permanent / http://www.loksattavideos.com/

I don't have any other file other than this in my hosting server for www.loksattavideos.com. It's purpose is to forward all the requests that it gets to www.loksattavideos.com with full path. By this, if there is any request like loksattavideos.com/a/b/c, then it redirects to www.loksattavideos.com/a/b/c.