How to map your domain name at GoDaddy with blogger/blogspot

I have just successfully registered my domain at GoDaddy and hosted in on Blogspot which obviously you can see. I did not find any exact guides for this task and it took me a while to do it successfully. So I thought why not to make my first post on this topic itself! After all domains are also a sort of softwares only.


So let's start.

1. First of all you need to buy a domain name at GoDaddy.com It is not the topic for this post so I would just give an overview for this. Go to GoDaddy.com, search for a domain name, log in to your GoDaddy account or sign up if you don't have an account. If the domain name is available, click on Add button. Now click on Continue to Checkout. Here select the mode of payment and complete the payment process.
2. Now that you have a domain let's proceed to the work of hosting it on Google servers or the blogspot servers (one and the same thing). First of all you need to make a sub-domain at blogspot. It is quite easy to do- go to blogspot.com, click on create a blog and enter the name of blog, choose a template and your blog is live. Now go to your blogger dashboard, click on the drop down just at the left side of View blog and click on Settings 
3. You will find an option to shift to custom domain- Add a custom domain.Click on the link for advanced settings. You will be shown a box to add the custom domain. Here add the GoDaddy domain you have registered. It will show you a message like shown below asking you to add the DNS with the domain registrar. You will have to do this option to get the 2 DNS addresses. This page will be useful so you can keep it open otherwise you can open it later too but do note down the two CNAME you have to enter. 
4. Now go to GoDaddy.com, log in if you haven't done it already and click on My Account.
5. Click on Domains followed by Launch corresponding to the domain you want to host on blogspot. You should be now in your Domain Manager page.
6. In the Domain Manager page in the right top wide you will find Quick Vew.   
7. Access the DNS Manager by clicking on the Launch button.
8. Add the 2 CNAME shown in your setting option like the one shown in image in point 3. While the first one will be same (host - www and  points to- ghs.google.com), the second one is unique for each and is required to verify your domain name ownership. In both leave the TTL values to default. This setting is all you need at GoDaddy to get your domain ready to be hosted on blogger. Now there are only a few steps that have to be done at blogger dashboard. If you do not want to redirect your yourdomainname.com to www.yourdomainname.com then you can skip the next step and directly proceed to the 10th step. However, after adding the CNAME the entries should look something like the image below. 
9. If you want your site to be accessible with or without the www then you can redirect yourdomainname.com to www.yourdomainname.com To do this you need to add 4 A NAME  in your GoDaddy DNS Manager page. This is the first entry there A (Host). You need to add 4 IP addresses of the 4 Google servers where you blog will be hosted. In the host name enter @ and the 4 IPs to be added are 216.239.32.21, 216.239.34.21, 216.239.36.21 and 216.239.38.21 You need to make 4 separate entries for the 4 IPs are shown in image below. Keep the TTL values to default.  
10. Save these Zone settings and now you are complete with the settings at GoDaddy. Now, if you have kept that Settings page at blogger open then its good otherwise open it again. Now in the Settings option go to advanced settings and add your domain address in the format www.yourdomainname.com and click on Save. This time it should be saved successfully. If you are successful then you will be shown a Edit button. Click on it and you will find a tick box which will ask if you want to do the redirection from www.yourdomainname.com to yourdomainname.com. Tick the check box, click on Save and you are done. Your blog should be working fine now.

Note: In case the settings at blogger show error even after correct settings at GoDaddy DNS Manager page then you should recheck your settings. Sometimes it does take 1-2 hours for the settings to kick in action but usually the effects are immediate.