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A question & a problem with custom domains
snappity
Registered Users Posts: 8 Beginner grinner
Question: I have for some time been using gallery.snappity.com to point to my smugmug page. Recently, I've been thinking that I want have www.snappity.com work in addition. Is there any way to do this without breaking links that I've inserted in online forums over the years, or am I screwed on this?
I did read up enough on this to know that I can just drop back to snappity.com (without a hostname) without breaking the "gallery" links (and I've got this working), but I'd still want it to work for the clue-impaired out there who think that everything has to start with www. Thus, only "www.snappity.com" would have to work to take someone to the main page, and gallery and images references underneath there wouldn't have to work correctly as long as the main page loaded.
I can see how to do this if I pay for hosting somewhere and create a redirect, but I was hoping I could avoid the cost and accomplish it with DNS trickery alone. I looked into using Go Daddy's domain forwarding, but that requires that @ forward through their web server, I didn't immediately see how to foward www alone. I can also get free basic web hosting from them with my domain registration, but that puts an advertising frame on the top. Any thoughts?
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Problem: Frequently I've noticed that it seems to take significantly longer to load my site through the gallery.snappity.com URL than it does to load the snappity.smugmug.com URL. Just now, for example, I tried loading gallery.snappity.com, and the browser just sat there "loading". So I went to another tab in the same browser and entered snappity.smugmug.com into the URL bar. In that tab, the page loaded forthwith. I was able to click on help and through to this forum, and then do a few searches for reports of similar problems before the gallery.snappity.com page finally finished loading. I'm pretty sure it isn't a name resolution thing because Firefox's status bar says it's loading something from smugmug.com as it sits there appearing to do nothing, so it must have at least figured that part out pretty well immediately. [FWIW, my DNS is hosted at Go Daddy.] I have noticed this happening for some time. It happens in multiple browsers, both at home and at work. Is domains.smugmug.com overloaded?
Apologies if either of these are already covered somewhere; I spent maybe a half an hour looking but my search juju just wasn't up to the task.
I did read up enough on this to know that I can just drop back to snappity.com (without a hostname) without breaking the "gallery" links (and I've got this working), but I'd still want it to work for the clue-impaired out there who think that everything has to start with www. Thus, only "www.snappity.com" would have to work to take someone to the main page, and gallery and images references underneath there wouldn't have to work correctly as long as the main page loaded.
I can see how to do this if I pay for hosting somewhere and create a redirect, but I was hoping I could avoid the cost and accomplish it with DNS trickery alone. I looked into using Go Daddy's domain forwarding, but that requires that @ forward through their web server, I didn't immediately see how to foward www alone. I can also get free basic web hosting from them with my domain registration, but that puts an advertising frame on the top. Any thoughts?
<hr>
Problem: Frequently I've noticed that it seems to take significantly longer to load my site through the gallery.snappity.com URL than it does to load the snappity.smugmug.com URL. Just now, for example, I tried loading gallery.snappity.com, and the browser just sat there "loading". So I went to another tab in the same browser and entered snappity.smugmug.com into the URL bar. In that tab, the page loaded forthwith. I was able to click on help and through to this forum, and then do a few searches for reports of similar problems before the gallery.snappity.com page finally finished loading. I'm pretty sure it isn't a name resolution thing because Firefox's status bar says it's loading something from smugmug.com as it sits there appearing to do nothing, so it must have at least figured that part out pretty well immediately. [FWIW, my DNS is hosted at Go Daddy.] I have noticed this happening for some time. It happens in multiple browsers, both at home and at work. Is domains.smugmug.com overloaded?
Apologies if either of these are already covered somewhere; I spent maybe a half an hour looking but my search juju just wasn't up to the task.
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Comments
In regards to the difference in load speeds though the direct link to your SmugMug page and the custom domain. Everything is working correctly. We have made some changes to speed up the site but they are currently only working for the direct URL, not with the custom domains. For more information on it you can see Baldy's post here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=103873.
SmugMug Technical Account Manager
Travel = good. Woo, shooting!
nickwphoto
So I just happened to try it again, and www.snappity.com is now working. I have @ (just snappity.com) as an A record pointing at 208.79.45.23, and www as a CNAME pointing at @. gallery.snappity.com is a CNAME pointing at domains.smugmug.com. I'd tried www pointing in each direction (toward @ and toward domains.smugmug.com) earlier today and swear I hadn't been able to get it to work either way. I suppose it could have been a DNS caching problem somewhere but I also thought I was checking for that. Anyway, all four paths now work (www, gallery, @ and snappity.smugmug.com).
I do still have random slowness in getting response through the custom domain.
Nick,
I saw your response after clicking submit on my follow-up. Sorry and thanks for the quick response. I've read through the two things you linked -- I see that the DNS trick -- to the extent that I can be solved with DNS tricks -- seems to be to chain the CNAMEs rather than having parallel references.
About the speed thing, that all makes sense now; I'm of course looking forward to this getting to my custom domain as well.