Using custom domains with Blogger

I have been using the FTP capabilities of Blogger for a while to maintain a blog on my own domain that was hosted at GoDaddy. However, blogger just announced that they would stop supporting FTP capabilities, thus they would only support blogs that were actually hosted by Blogger (or Google).

Fortunately, they have a feature that still enables my blog to be posted at my domain name. Under the publishing part of settings, I am able to specify a unique domain name. In my case I use blog.johnhufnagel.com. The blog.hufnagel.com is set up as a sub-domain of hufnagel.com. I am then able to set up a sub-domain at my domain registrar (which happens to be GoDaddy). Sample instructions for this can be found at How Do I create a cname record for my custom domain

After the subdomain is set-up, it will automatically point to ghs.google.com which is the location where the subdomain for the blog is hosted.

Thus, the blog is hosted by Google, I get to use my own domain.

Google also provides the options of buying a domain name directly through Google. This is a more straight forward approach if you only want to do blogging on your website. Since there are a lot of other features I wanted on my website, I preferred to have my domain name registered with a conventional hosting company.