GL Pro Tips - Using Your Own Domain

On Wednesday, Guild Launch Pro Tips will explore common issues, a look at features as well as creative ideas on how to use the Guild Launch system. This week, Mike will guide you through configuring your domain to work with your guild site.

So you have a Guild Launch guild website and you have a domain (or want to get one), how do you make them communicate? Domain Pointing is an available feature for your guild site and I am going to show you how to get things set up.

First of all, Domain Pointing requires you have two things. The first one is a subscription based site and the other is a domain. The subscription based site is easy, click the Upgrade Site link in the top, left-hand corner of your guild site then follow the steps to upgrade. Any of our premium choices will allow Domain Pointing.

The most difficult part about getting your domain is choosing a Registrar - a company that sells domain names. When shopping for a Registrar keep one thing in mind, they need to support A Record modification. The A Record acts as a traffic sign that directs users to your guild site and is crucial to this process. A quick email to the Registrar's Technical Support will answer that question for you. Since we know both GoDaddy and Network Solutions offers A Record modification we suggest purchasing your domain through them, but any Registrar will work.

With your Subscription based site and your domain ready, lets configure them so they work together. The first thing to do is go to your Admin section and click the Guild Hosting Properties link on the left, then scroll down to the Plan Add-Ons area. At the very bottom of that area is an input box for adding your domain. It starts with www. and an area to type the rest. If you purchased http://www.glmike.com then just put glmike.com in the box. Click the Add Domain button and you are finished with the first part.

The second part of this process is not handled by Guild Launch, but by your Registrar. Because there are so many different Registrars and each of them are different, I suggest emailing their Technical Support staff about setting up your A Record. You will simply tell them you want an A Record that points to the IP Address 74.200.254.228.

Pro Tip - It is often useful with some registrars to set up 2 A Records for your domain, one with www.domainname.com and one without the www. attached. Some Registrars have a setting to allow for both options in one record and this is a question for your Registrar.

The critical aspect of the setup is that when you type the domain with the "WWW" in front of the domain name that it gets to our server. So http://www.glmike.com/ should be pointed at 74.200.254.228 via your A-Record. It is perfectly alright for the short version to point to the site also, but our servers will redirect it to the longer version so that the URLs are uniform.

You are of course free to tackle this yourself, however all questions concerning your domain and DNS modification should be directed to your Registrar's Technical Support. Also note, that changes to your domain can take up to 24 hours to process.

There you have it, that is all it takes to set up your domain so it points to your guild website. If you have questions or troubles with this process you can email me - support@guildlaunch.com

~Mike