How to Setup a Custom Domain From Site5
This is a little illustrated tutorial for how to register a domain with Site5 and have it point to another service, such as Posterous. This is partially for other people to see how to do this, and partially because I always forget how.
First, though, a word about Site5. I have been using them as a web host and domain registrar for a couple years now. I initially tried them out for three reasons:
- Very cheap shared hosting accounts. Unlimited email accounts, forwarders, MySQL databases, and more.
- Support for Ruby/Ruby on Rails. They now use Phusion Passenger
- Shell access. You can log into a real shell via SSH and do most anything you need to.
Now, shared hosting is very close to the bottom of the barrel in the hosting world, but for low-traffic, personal websites, Site5 has worked great for me. I've even kept a couple (private) Subversion repositories on there with no problems. It is so cheap (my current account is $5/month for 110GB of storage and 5TB of bandwidth) that I've kept it, even though I have virtual host accounts on Linode and Slicehost now for other things. If you like creating and managing sites by hand, Site5 will probably work for you, too.
Anyhow! Enough with the sales pitch and on with the tutorial.
Registering a Domain
If you have already registered a domain with Site5, you can skip down to setting up the domain.
First, log into your Site5 account through their Backstage account manager.
You will see something like this:
Click on the "Domains" tab, then go to "Register a Domain".
Put in a domain you would like to have and click "Search". If it is available, you can then go through the process of purchasing the domain.
Setting Up Your Domain
Once you have your domain, you need to switch to the SiteAdmin for your account.
Click "Manage My Domains" and then "Domain Pointers". Then click where it says "Click here to add a domain pointer to your account."
Put in your new domain name, then press tab or click on the next box. The Subdomain/FTP user and the directory fields will be filled in automatically. Just leave these as-is unless you have reason to change them. Provide a password, although you are unlikely to ever need to use it.
Click "Create Pointer".
Your new domain will now point to a subdirectory in your account. NOTE: It may take some time (up to a couple days) for this to actually take effect.
Editing Your DNS File
If you are setting up a custom domain for Posterous or another hosting provider, you need to get an IP address from them. Directions from Posterous are available here. If you have your own server somewhere or on a virtual host, you need that IP address so you can point your domain to it.
From Site5's SiteAdmin, go to "Manage My Domains" and then "DNS Zone Files". Select your domain and click "View/Edit Zone File".
This brings up a complicated-looking page. Ignore the top and scroll down to the text fields.
I recommend just changing the two shown below: one is your domain by itself, the other is www.yourdomain.com.
Change the IP address to the one from Posterous or wherever it is you need to point your domain.
Once this is changed, you may again need to wait for the changes to propagate across the Internet.
Setting Custom Domain on Posterous
This is really simple. Log into Posterous, go to "Settings" and put in your domain.
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