Often people would like http://www.mydomain.com and http://mydomain.com to point to their website hosted by a 3rd party. In order to do this, configuration changes will need to be made in the resource records managed by your domain service provider. Basically you will be Forwarding or redirecting http://mydomain.com to http://my_hosteddomain.com/.
There are two basic ways of doing this. I'll cover each in their own sections.
- Replace the A records of you Resource Records
- Use Forwarding or Redirection
- In the 3rd section is a tool for requesting direct help from me. You will need to supply me with your domain name, login URLs, admin username(s), and passwords. I will only respond to those also using GApps. Sorry but I won't respond to those asking for help through a posted comment for this help page.
Replace the A records of you Resource Records
- Delete any existing A records in your DNS records. Of course document your changes.
- Add two A records with www and @ pointing to the IP address of your 3rd party website. Set the TTL to 1 hour.
Use Forwarding or Redirection
Log into the Domain Manager of your Service Provider. The examples beIow are for GoDaddy and eNom.
If GoDaddy is your service provider:
- On the Domain Manager page, cIick on the link under Forwarding and enable Forwarding as shown in the screenshot below.
- Enter the url of the home page of your website. Forwarding will result in showing the page URLs of your 3rd party website and not the GApps mydomain.com name you registered. Turning on Masking will show mydomain.com in the browser when viewing your hosted site but every page will show mydomain.com in your browser's internet address.
- Select either 301 (moved "permanently") or 302 (Moved Temporarily). 301 is useful for speed of access and but can later be changed.
- CIick on Total DNS Control and MX Records. See link at bottom in above Figure.
- Change or add a CNAME of www so it points to the symbol @
- Save the changes and WAIT for up to 48 hours for the changes to propagate to all necessary world-wide servers
- Within the GApps control panel, reset to the default any URL using www
If eNom is your service provider:
- Add a Host Record with @ as the Host Name, the url of the home page of your web site and URL Redirect as the Record Type. This Redirect type will result in showing the page URLs of your 3rd party website and not the GApps mydomain.com name you registered. Using URL Frame will show mydomain.com in the browser when viewing your hosted site but it will be in a frame hosted on eNom's server. You'll need to put '"target=_top"' into links leaving each page. See the eNom Help page in their Edit Host Records section for more details. Please ignore the address of the URL FRAME record as it's just an example.
- Change or add a CNAME of www so it points to the symbol @
- Save the changes and WAIT for up to 48 hours for the changes to propagate to all necessary world-wide servers.
- Within the GApps control panel, reset the Custom url for Web Pages to the Default Setting, i.e. remove the www.
Special Instructions for users who purchased their domain name from Google:
- Login to your Service provider using the Advanced DNS Settings Link within the GApps Control Panel.
- If you see the following A Records pointing to Google Servers (216.239.32.21 and 216.239.34.21 and 216.239.36.21 and 216.239.38.21 ), delete them.
- For GoDaddy customers: Add an A record with Host Name: @ Points to: 64.202.189.170 and TTL: 1 hour.
Additional Resources
Original Posted by Late Larry H
