Stay Away from Blogger Custom Domains

OK–I give up. Trying to use the new Google domain hosting feature I blogged about a couple of days ago has proven to be a disastrous idea. Big (BIG) mistake. This thing is one of the worst user experiences I have ever had, and I am a pretty patient guy in the technical world.

This horrible service is based on a great idea, but its lousy implementation and buggy, confusing, destructive architecture killed my traffic for a few days and screwed up my own URL. I can’t get doublebassblog.com out of Google’s grasp at the moment.

This is a long way of saying that this blog will remain here at jasonheath.blogspot.com for the future. I don’t have the time or the inclination to mess with this behind-the-scenes garbage–I wouldn’t have tried this feature if it hadn’t appeared to be so easy. Let me assure you–it is not as simple as it sounds.

After about 12 hours of being up on doublebassblog.com, the blog would vanish and be replaced by a welcome screen. I could tinker with some settings and get it back, but it would break about 12 hours later.

The big problem (and one that is not clear when you begin the process) is that you have to use a service called Google Apps for your Domain. The idea is great, but the implementation is confusing, archaic, confusing, and downright lousy.

For one thing, I could easily sign up for the service, but there is NO OPTION TO CANCEL THE SERVICE! It sinks its Google Apps talons into your URL and won’t let go. You have to contact Google Customer Service (there’s a fun link to try to find–ever e-mail Google Customer Service before?).

Here’s my pleading letter to the Google customer Service folks:

Dear Google Apps Support,

I have a Blogspot blog located at jasonheath.blogspot.com. I wanted to use the new custom domain name Google Apps for your Domain. I created a username in Google Apps of jasonheath for my doublebassblog.com domain and put in an MX record in GoDaddy. It worked fine–traffic could get to my blog at doublebassblog.com and was being redirected from jasonheath.blogspot.com without any problem.

I noticed that www.doublebassblog.com didn’t go anywhere. I decided to create a welcome page within Google Apps and entered “www” as the subdomain for the publishing page. Big mistake, it seems. My blog all of a sudden started automatically directing people to this welcome page and not to my blog. It was not possible to visit doublebassblog.com–it would bounce you back to www.doublebassblog.com in an endless loop.

I went into Google Apps and changed the subdomain to welcome.doublebassblog.com. The same thing happened, only now it automatically bounced you to welcome.doublebassblog.com in an endless loop.

I turned off the service of custom subdomains within GoDaddy, but this made no difference. It still endlessly bounced you to the welcome.doublebassblog.com page.

Putting my blog back on Blogspot at jasonheath.blogspot.com, then waiting a few minutes and republishing would fix everything. Approximately 12 hours later, that irritating welcome.doublebassblog.com page was back and no one could access my blog.

I went into the GoDaddy MX records for doublebassblog.com and deleted the CMANE record for jasonheath pointing to ghs.google.com. My blog is still being redirected to Google with a 404 not found error (I know it’s a Google 404 by the favicon in my address bar). I am trying to forward doublebassblog.com to jasonheath.blogspot.com, but it won’t redirect.

There is no option in Google Apps for your Domain to cancel the service. PLEASE cancel this service for me. It is not working for me and now I can’t even forward my own domain name.

If you can offer any advice on how this problem could have been fixed, please let me know, but for now please immediately remove doublebassblog.com from the Google Apps for your Domain service.

I am an early adopter oftentimes, and this is the price I sometimes pay. I just want to offer this up as a cautionary tale about this service.

OK–I’m done ranting about this–I just had to get it out. I’ve got all sorts of new fun stuff to share with my readers, and that will happen starting tomorrow, but I just had to get all of this off of my chest. I’m too exhausted now to post anything else tonight, but tomorrow is another day.

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14 Comments

  1. Blog Bloke
    Blog Bloke on January 16, 2007 at 9:57 am

    Hi Jason. I too have been having my share of woes. Did you try this:

    Log into Google Apps and click on “Domain web pages”, then “Change web publishing address”.

    Change the “www” to something weird like “lkhdjh”. That might confuse it enough to let go.

    But all might not be lost yet. Here is how I did it:

    I merely changed the CNAMES alias “www” to point to “ghs.google.com” and it works like a charm (so far so good).

    Did you try that? Let me know.

    …BB

  2. Jason Heath
    Jason Heath on January 16, 2007 at 12:21 pm

    Thanks for the tip–I will give it a try and see what happens. Something strange happened when I pointed my domain name to ghs.google.com. Now the domain will not forward even after deleting the CNAME records for ghs.google.com. Frustrating.

  3. oceanskies79
    oceanskies79 on January 16, 2007 at 3:41 pm

    Jason, I think you deserve an award of being one of the most patient folks where technology is concerned. I might have spam the customer service with one email per minute until it responds.

    Hope the woes are over?

  4. Jacque
    Jacque on January 16, 2007 at 7:26 pm

    btw, Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) shows that there is some kind of problem with your RSS feed — still seems to be able to read it, however.
    (this at 1325 hours central standard time on Tuesday January 16.)

  5. Jason Heath
    Jason Heath on January 17, 2007 at 12:34 pm

    Thanks for the nice words, PY. Everything is working fine now, although I would caution people against jumping into the custom domain option. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet.

  6. Jason Heath
    Jason Heath on January 17, 2007 at 12:37 pm

    Thanks for the info, Jacque. There may be something on my end I can do. I will poke around in Feedburner and clean up some settings.

  7. oceanskies79
    oceanskies79 on January 17, 2007 at 5:14 pm

    I shall take note of your advice. Hey, this post earns quite a lot of comments too.

    By the way, do you happen to know how to edit and cut out a segment of a DVD recording so that I can post that segment online? My conductor has given me a DVD recording of the entire chamber concert (the one that me and Emily and the rest of the double bass quartet had played in), but I have no idea what to do to post just that segment of the double bass quartet online.

    If you happen to know, could you please advise? My email and MSN address is oceanskies at hotmail dot com. Thanks in advance.

  8. Jason Heath
    Jason Heath on January 18, 2007 at 12:24 pm

    I am not extremely good with that sort of DVD thing, but I will e-mail you and let you know what I’ve done before.

  9. oceanskies79
    oceanskies79 on January 18, 2007 at 11:42 pm

    Thank you Jason. One of my other blog friends told me I could use Quicktime Pro to edit. However, I don’t have Quicktime Pro.

    Will be keen to hear if there are other ways to cut that segment out.

  10. Jason Heath
    Jason Heath on January 19, 2007 at 2:41 pm

    I just dropped you an e-mail with a suggestion. Hope it works!

  11. Rooster
    Rooster on January 29, 2007 at 4:16 am

    You forgot to tell us how you were able to contact Google customer service. You mentioned it is difficult, but you never shared with us how you actually did it.

    Is there a form to fill out or an email address?

    I’m having problems too. My problem is that I signed up for a domain through Google, and my homepage goes to a start page, which is nothing more than personalized Google for your domain. I disabled it but it’s still going there, even though it says its disabled.

    I try to add my domain name in Blogger, but it says that the name is already being used by another blog. I own the stinking domain! It’s driving me crazy. I’m screaming at my computer. My neighbors probably think I’ve gone psycho. I feel like Michael Bolton from Office Space, where he’s stomping on the fax machine.

    I’m sure that eventually this service will be awesome, but I’m kind of frustrated now, because nobody seems to know what to do, and Google’s support is extremely vague.

    As I mentioned, I bought the domain through Google which has a partnership with GoDaddy for GAFYD. But I’m not all that concerned with GAFYD, although having Google Pages work with this and Gmail would be cool. I certainly don’t need 200 accounts. I just want my blog to use my domain.

    Now what?

  12. Jason Heath
    Jason Heath on January 31, 2007 at 12:13 pm

    It sounds like you are having the exact same problem that I was having with Apps for your Domain. I decided to just use by BlogSpot account after a week of the kind of stuff you are talking about. Once you log in to Apps for Your Domain there will be a link to contact Google. You can click it and fill out a form (you can only briefly state your problem). Then Google will e-mail you an “is this for real?” message which you need to respond to. Then FINALLY (a few days later for me) Google will e-mail you with some pretty complicated instructions on how to delete your account.

    I have absolutely no idea why they make it so hard to stop using their service, and I have no idea on earth why the URL will keep forwarding to the Google subdomain. That is exactly what happened to me, and it killed my traffic for a week (my numbers are still low from that experience–when people can’t get to your site sometimes they forget about you).

  14. Jason Heath
    Jason Heath on February 5, 2007 at 11:59 am

    I just checked out your post about the problems you’ve been having–frustrating. Google Apps is a great idea, and I just hope that these bugs get worked out. I was really excited to try it, but I’m going to hold off for quite a while myself.