“Corrected Transcript:
Okay, so we previously created an Instablog, but of course, we’re not going to want to use the domain name 24-8-22RFblog.net, right? We want to use our own domain name. Now, that’s really straightforward to do; it’s just like any hosting environment. We don’t have any special powers over the internet, right? Your registrar is where you control your domain name. And we’re not a registrar; we’re just a hosting company. So when you go to your registrar, you get to select where you point that domain name using, well, a couple of different ways, but in our case, we’re using A records because they’re the most efficient.
And so, let’s go look at my registrar for one of my domain names. Yours is going to look different. GoDaddy, Namecheap, or whatever. They all have some similarities just because of what’s required in order to manage the domain names. So let’s go look at one of mine, okay? And what you want to find is wherever in your registrar, it’ll look different than this one. This one’s very austere and old school, okay? But you’re going to want to look for DNS, Domain Name Services. That’s the key, alright? So wherever that is, whatever that looks like, what you need to do is you need to add A records. A stands for address, I think, I don’t know, it’s not, you know, who knows, right? But if we go look at that, use this DNS A record for Vanity Domain. Now this little copy button here, I’m going to copy that so I don’t have to type it. Although amazingly I know it by heart, right? So add an A record. Now for the top-level domain for this registrar, it’s blank. And for most registrars, it’s going to be an at sign, is what you want to do for top level. So at the very least, I need to do this.
Now, there’s a special case that we need to deal with, and it’s one of those things that I wish the inventors of the internet did not ever create. This was a dumb idea from the beginning. And that’s the whole www subdomain. So your top level, like N7LER.com, and www.N7LER.com are literally two different domains. The www is a subdomain of the root domain. Just like if I had like a blog. or, you know, help. or mail., for example. Any of those things are subdomains. They are not the same as the root domain. However, people have it stuck in their head that if they want to go to N7LER, and you hear this on commercials all the time, they say just go to www.mygreatstuff.com. No, just please stop doing the www, please. I mean, it’s a complete waste of your fingers and typing, wearing out the W keys, I know, okay, off my soapbox, but I want to have both the root domain and the www. Now because it’s such a problem, we are protecting you from yourself. We enforce this. Now, if you’re using blog., we don’t, but if you’re using a root domain, N7LER or xyz.com or whatever, right? We enforce the requirement to have www as well, because almost everybody screws this up. In fact, even WordPress does, okay? So if you have a root domain, in my case, N7LER, right? Nothing in front of it, then yes, you need to have www as well, and we will enforce that. If you get an error message about that, it will tell you if a www is not defined, it’ll tell you to define it.
Now, for some sites different story, for example, blog.resultflow.com, nobody even considers putting a www in that. They don’t, they don’t ever type in www.blog.resultflow.com, right? Nobody does that, right? So we don’t enforce it. It’s only for root domains. We’ll enforce www.
Now, I hope I said that enough times for you to remember it because it comes up all the time. Okay, I’m going to hit save in my registrar. Now, technically it can take some number of minutes. It almost never does. Usually, it takes a small number of seconds for A records to propagate. And so we’re going to go see, find out how fast it’s propagated here in my vanity domain now that, okay, well, I guess I should explain this on the way. So now that my registrar knows that I want to host this domain at that IP address, then over here on our hosting, now I can put in that domain and they’re going to talk to each other, they’re going to handshake, okay? But bear in mind, it’s like my hosting company. I can’t just rip your domain away from you; the registrar has to say, “Yeah, here you go. I’m offering it up to you with that IP address.” Okay? So let’s go ahead and hit update here and see if it’s working. Hopefully, I chattered long enough that yeah, it looks like I see already. I can tell that it is actually propagated and we’re going through the process of updating the WordPress database and our proxy server and SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt and blah blah blah. There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on in the background there for that, whatever that was, 15 seconds that it took.
Okay, so now I want to close in order to save the new creds. And that’s just a user interface thing. But at this point, remember before it said 24-8-22, now it says N7LER. And so if I hit that doorway, sure enough, I will see my brand new Instablog, but it’ll be showing at N7LER.com. Simple, easy peasy as that, that’s all there is to it. You don’t have to do anything more with it. We continue to refresh the SSL, so, oops, went the wrong place there. We refresh the SSL cert whenever it’s required, which is every 90 days. Everything is good here.
Okay, well, I guess, I mean, I can demonstrate that too, right? I mean, that’s the same thing. The admin portal is also updated, right? So you don’t have to worry about that. The other thing that happens, because we made sure we have www established as well, www will forward correctly to the non-www version. So you don’t have the problem like duplicate content, you know, which is kind of mythology, but whatever. But you know, anybody who puts in www.N7LER is going to end up at N7LER.com, and those are exactly the same, which is absolutely what we want. We don’t want to have them both show up. So that’s it. So create an Instablog by literally pushing a button and then transfer your domain name from your registrar using this magic set of digits. And then you put in your vanity, hit update again, and 15 to 20 seconds later, you’re good to go.”
