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How I added a custom domain to Blogger (for free)

I will preface this post by saying that I am not a web expert by any means. Most of this is compiled from reading various tutorials/forum posts and trial & error. However, it may hopefully save you a bit of time if you are also trying to add a custom domain to your Blogger site. 

The Domain Name

The first step is to purchase your custom domain. Again, I haven't done a detailed investigation into the best places to purchase domain names from. However, it seems that the 'big name' sellers (e.g. GoDaddy) will often have more expensive prices compared to less well known domain sellers. You could try somewhere like https://www.namecheap.com. 

Because I live in Australia, I was able to get a free .com.au domain from VentraIP for 12 months. They give away 5000 of these domains per year (https://ventraip.com.au/domain-giveaway) - because I found it in April, they had only given away about 3000 domains for the year and so I could easily snag one. The continuing domain cost looks to be about AU$20/year, so I will decide if I want to continue with it after my free 12 month period ends. 

It is worth noting that you have to have a business for VentraIP to give you a .com.au domain. I used my individual trader ABN for this. 

Hosting Website

The second thing to do is find somewhere to host your website. Again, there are not that many websites which will host your website for free. I did check out X10 Hosting, which offers a free hosting service, but it was too technically advanced for me to get my head around at this stage. 

If - like me - you don't have any experience with website design, html coding, etc., then you will probably want a low-tech solution. If you have a custom domain which is not .com.au, then you may be able to make a free Wordpress account and add your custom domain there. However, Wordpress doesn't support the .com.au extension at present, so it was not an option for me. 

Otherwise you can do what I did and go with blogger.com. Depending on the type of website you are visualising, there seem to be considerable limitations (particularly around customisation/design) associated with blogger.com. 

Adding Your Custom Domain

Now we get down to the nuts and bolts. 

Here's a step by step list of what I did: 

  1. Create a blogger.com account and new blog with a .blogspot.com address. 
  2. In Blogger, go to the settings tab and scroll down to the Publishing section. 


  3. Click on the Custom domain button and paste your domain name (with www. on the front). 
  4. When you click save, it should come up with a similar error message. 
  5. I followed the instructions at https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/1233387 to resolve this issue. These specific instructions are specific to VentraIP, but the general steps may be similar for different domain providers. 
  6. Open your VIP control panel (https://vip.ventraip.com.au/dashboard) and login. 
  7. Scroll down to the Domain Names section and click the DNS button beside the domain name you want to map to Blogger. 
  8. This will open up the Domain Names manager page. Near the top of the page, click on the DNS Hosting tab.
  9. If DNS is not currently activated for your domain, activate it following the instructions on this tab. 
  10. The DNS Hosting tab should show the current records for the domain name zone. The default settings for my domain had an IP address listed as two "A names" - one for www.joeljohnson.com.au and one for joeljohnson.com.au. The IP address just redirected to a page which said "Domain parked with VentraIP Australia". 
  11. Delete both A name records. 
  12. Add the two cname records specified by Blogger in step 4 above. 
  13. A few minutes after saving this, typing www.joeljohnson.com.au into a web browser took me to my Blogger site. However, I also wanted to set up a naked redirect so that https://joeljohnson.com.au would redirect to www.joeljohnson.com.au. The instructions for this are provided at https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/1233387, under the Redirect URL without subdomain to your blog’s URL section. 
  14. Remove any remaining A name records. 
  15. Add four A name records; one for each of the following IP addresses. Note that in VentraIP, you need to type an @ symbol in the hostname box to allow you to add an A name at the domain top level (i.e. for the whole domain including any subdomains). 
    216.239.32.21
    216.239.34.21
    216.239.36.21
    216.239.38.21
  16. This is the full list of my name records after completing the above steps: 
  17. Back in the Settings tab of Blogger (Publishing section), turn on Redirect domain. 

Note: after I initially saved everything, then navigating to my custom domain didn't work initially. However, it began working properly after a day or two. 
I think this could be related to me trying to turn on HTTPS availability, which I don't have set up. 




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