I’ve spent another Satyam Cinemas ticket for hosting, this time, to a host which got older-but-stable versions of softwares. I’ve migrated database to this new one as well. Guess what, this time, I’m trying yet-another-new-thing. Now, I’ve two hosting packages on two different hosts (didn’t waste much money, total cost is three tickets at Satyam Cinemas). My DNS management is done for free by ZoneEdit and it supports Round-robin DNS (A technique that enables a domain to be hosted on multiple servers, and to have the load balanced between them) So, I configured both servers to have my blog and one of the will be pointed by ZoneEdit’s DNS Servers when you request. Reasons for this action

• I’ve no clue why I did this :)
• Let me see if I get to learn something new as I got so many new doubts right now while doing it
• First host is bad, I don’t know about second host. Atleast one of them will up to serve the blog :P

I’ve no clue for following questions

• How am I going to synchronize posts at both the servers ?
• Will DNS server point you to the second server automatically when the first server is down ?
• What exactly will be happening in the background at DNS server and my browser when I request a page ?

I’m sure that I’ll get more doubts and I’m more sure that I’m going to find answers for these questions. If you’ve answers for my questions, please let me know, otherwise, I will let you guys know when I find solutions :)

Well, welcome again to K World @ Selfdabba. My journey of moving my blog from blogger was not only interesting, but also informative. I’ve learned a little about DNS systems and what are the things I should take care about while dealing with domain names. The first part of this post is about how managed to migrate my previous blog. The second part is about all the domain issues. As I’m using wordpress as my blogging platform here, it’s as simple as drinking coke to import your blogger posts.

1. Just goto your Admin Page, Click Manage - and then import.
2. Click on Blogger, Press Authorize button there. Make sure that you are logged in into Google Account which deals with your blog on blogger.
3. Just select the username to migrate those posts to or create a new user and its DONE !!!

I faced a small problem here, SSL would be needed to connect to Blogger servers, as the transaction of database would be happening over encrypted channel. My host didn’t support SSL, so, I had to do a small work around to do that. I created an account on wordpress and imported my blogger posts to that account by using the above 3 steps. Then

1. On wordpress.com, I went to Admin page, Manage - Export
2. Pressed “Download Export File” button and saved the XML file, which is database
3. On this blog, I went to Admin page, Manage - Import
4. Clicked on Wordpress, selected the downloaded XML file and pressed “Upload and import” button
5. Tada !!! Migration is DONE :-)

This was the easiest part of my Journey. The Second part (which supposedly happened before this) was my most confused part and most informative part. I bought two domains - mondayphobia.com and selfdabba.com and I’ve no clue what to do with them. All I knew was, I’ve to point them to my host’s nameservers and I did the same. But, being a guy who knows little technology, I wanted to make more out of my domain names than just pointing them to ONE silly server. I asked the guy from whom I bought my domain that I want DNS management of my domain and he told that he would give that service for a very small fee. I bought that service, I had add four more Name Servers to my domain registration. Well, You need to have lots of patience while dealing with DNS, as it would take some time to propagate through the name servers all over the world. Being guy with very less patience (or being over anxious guy who couldn’t wait) I complained about this to an experienced guy, AJ (one of the guys behind all successful, Indian version of Yelp - Burrp) He suggested me to use ZoneEdit service. I went there, registered there, and added two more nameservers to my domains. Then, I felt lame that I didn’t know much about DNS servers and started reading about them and on journey, I visited DNSStuff, which gives a very good report about your zone a.k.a domain. It gave me so many parameters which confused me a lot and actually increased my zeal to study about them. Well, it goes like this. Just follow these steps, your domain management will go as simple as possible.

1. Have lots of patience, nothing is going to work in 10 minutes. Make your changes and wait for a day or two to reflect. But, before leaving them to reflect, make sure that everything is correct.
2. Two Nameservers are required - Primary Nameserver and Secondary Namesever. If you are not “my” type of user, and all you want to do is to host some pages, add the entries given by your hosting service and forget everything.
3. Well, If you want to try more, you can do following stuff - Create subdomains
   1. Create a bunch of emails for your friends and family ending with your domain name
   2. Save your domain from spammers abuse by creating SPF record
   3. Create canonical names for some other site
   4. Learn a lot more about DNS ;)

If you are still reading this post, you probably are interested about doing more with your domain name.

1. Creating Subdomains : Anything.YourDomain.Com is a subdomain. You can use these as Canonical Names where you forward guys who visit that subdomain to entirely different domain or You can create an Alias, where you point your subdomain to particular IP address. If the webserver running on that IP address knows the vhost (another issue, you’ve to take care) it will serve the page Or, You can create an IP Alias for *.yourdomain.com and serve particular subdomain by filtering with a .htaccess file. If you are wondering how blogspot or wordpress.com or wordpress Mu works, you know the answer now.
2. You can modify your MX entries pointing towards Google servers (Service name - Google Apps) and you can get gmail service on your domain - in simple words, You get gmail webspace and interface for your @yourdomain email ID
3. Create Canonical Names a.k.a CNAMEs on your domain for ghs.google.com (Service name - Google Apps) and you can get calendar, homepage, docs services on your domain.
4. Create an SPF record in TXT records of your domain so that spammers can’t abuse your domain. In short words, spammers can mail someone using youremail@yourdomain.com email-id. But, if you’ve SPF record which specifies the servers which can mail using youremail@yourdomain.com email-id, the receiving server can mark the email as SPAM by identifying the sending server. More info @ OpenSPF

Use your creativity and find out more uses and please let me know if I’m wrong anywhere. Don’t forget to read this very good tutorial by Scott Perry. He wrote everything in simple words so that anyone can understand. Well, I’ve messed up my DNS settings again while writing this post. If some thing goes wrong …. Uhmm, it would be good coz it would let me learn more. If everything’s going to be fine, then it’s too good that I can continue learning something else :D