Be the master of your domain

If you want to take full control of your domain — your domain name that is — I've got just the service for you. Call ZoneEdit.com, it allows you to do all kinds of neat things. And most of the features are free for your first five domains! Here are a few of the things you can do:

• Forward, or redirect, your domain to another URL. For instance, if you have a site at a free hosting service like Geocities, you can point www.yourdomain.com to that site.
• Forward your domain e-mail addresses ("mail@yourdomain.com") to other e-mail addresses, such as a Yahoo! or Hotmail account. You can also set up a wildcard forward so that all e-mail to your domain gets forwarded to a specified address.
• Have a placeholder page for domains that you don't have a site — or host — for, yet.
• Run your own mail server (normally a scary proposition) using ZoneEdit.com's Backup Mail Service. It will accept e-mails for you while your mail server is down or unavailable, and redeliver them when you're back up.

If you have a Web site, ZoneEdit.com may make your life easier.

(It works great with TypePad's Domain Mapping, which lets you transparently point your own domain name to your TypePad blog!)

ZoneEdit.com

Comments

[Craig]

Hi Steve

I am also using Zoneedit and wondered how quickly it took for changes to occur on your Typepad site after you've turned on Domain Mapping.

Also did you complete your A record and CNAME with the details returned by Typepad?

I'm close with the mapping but it's not quite right at the moment - any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Craig

[Steve]

Hi Craig -

Thanks for the visit and for getting in touch. I'll respond to each of your questions:

> ...wondered how quickly it took for
> changes to occur on your Typepad site
> after you've turned on Domain Mapping.

I'm not sure I understand your question exactly, so I'll try to cover all bases. The actual changes within TypePad -- those of changing your domain within your blog -- happen instantly when you re-publish your site after setting up Domain Mapping and turning it on.

As for traffic to your domain going to your TypePad site: Once you change the DNS server settings with your domain registrar to point to ZoneEdit, it takes about 24-48 hours for those changes to propagate around the Internet and for all traffic for your domain to be directed to your TypePad site.

Once you've set the DNS servers for your domain to ZoneEdit's DNS servers, changes made within ZoneEdit will happen almost instantly.

> Also did you complete your A record and CNAME with the details
> returned by Typepad?

I have left the A record blank as the instructions on ZoneEdit made it sound like this was the thing to do -- although I may be wrong here. It is working, though. I have the CNAME set to point my domain to my TypePad account, exactly as TypePad instructs, and then I have MailForwarding set up to forward mail for my domain to another account. I don't have a mail server set up at all.

I'll take another look at my e-mail threads with my registrar, TypePad, and ZoneEdit and pass along anything else I may have missed.

Best regards -
Steve

[Leonie]

Hi Steve, I'm glad I found someone else using ZoneEdit with Typepad.

I've set up my DNS the same as you suggest. I've left the A address blank and set the domain to point to myblog.typepad.com. I used the default option of setting both the domain and the domain with www preceding it.

The domain itself is now pointing to the weblog without a problem but I get a 404 error when typing the www.domain.com into the browser.

Any ideas on how to get the www working as well?