If you are a 500px “Awesome” customer and wish to make use of their custom domain feature, they helpfully provide instructions for how to map your domain to your 500px account using Godaddy as your domain registrar. Unfortunately for me I’m already a Dreamhost customer and wanted to keep everything under one roof for convenience. The way to map your domain to 500px is different on the Dreamhost panel and it may not be immediately obvious to everyone how the instructions translate across.
Once you’ve paid for your domain and the request has gone through, you’ll need to tell Dreamhost what you are going to do with that domain. Here you have the option to buy a hosting package like I have for this site, use Google’s DNS services or choose from a few other options. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll see the basic “just DNS” option. Pick this one.
Now you need to point your new URL to 500px. You do this by first creating an A record. Head into the Manage Domains section of the web panel and look for the “add a custom DNS record”. You can usually ignore the “Name” field, so skip right on to “type”. Here you want to change the drop-down menu to say “A”. Godaddy calls this “@” but Dreamhost tells it like it is…
Next you need to put the IP address 500px give you on their domain page into the “Value” box. The comment box isn’t necessary, but I just put 500px in there. Click the “Edit Record Now!” box.
If we leave it at that your domain will work, but only without the www in the URL. Whilst this shouldn’t cause a problem if you bring traffic in through hyperlinks, if you tell people what your web address is they might assume it has a www in it. To fix this we also need a CNAME.
In the “Add another custom DNS record” section, type www into the “Name” box, then in the “Type” box you’ll want to change it to CNAME. In “Value” you’ll want to type in your domain name without the http://www bit. Press the “Edit Record Now!” button and wait patiently for the DNS servers to propagate the new information. It took around an hour for me but it can take up to 72.
In the meantime, you can tell 500px what your new URL is on the domain page. That also takes up to 72 hours to take effect (again, about an hour for me) so you’ll have a bit of waiting to do. Probably a good time to make sure your chosen portfolio theme is right for you!
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#1 by gotimmy on January 24, 2012 - 2:01 pm
Useful advice – this applies to Bandcamp as well.