Many of my friends labour under the mistaken belief that I fully understand how the internet works. Sadly, I don’t. I understand how emails and web pages get from A to B in broad terms, but at a detailed level I know there are big gaps where knowledge ought to be but isn’t. I assume most people who work in IT feel the same way, given how immensely complicated and layered the whole thing is.

This state of affairs means that occasionally friends ask for help and I confidently state, “That will be the work of mere moments!” And then spend a week figuring out how to accomplish whatever it is.

The latest request seemed simple enough: move an existing blog from its generic blogspot.com address to a “custom domain”.

This is a neat service whereby users of Google’s Blogger service can use a subdomain that they own, such as www.lembingley.co.uk, to point to a blog that might otherwise have a less personalised address, like lembingley.blogspot.com.

It’s handy because users don’t have to pay for hosting or muck about with FTP - the content still lives at Blogger and the domain switch is done with smoke, mirrors, and redirects. Once you’ve chosen the custom domain option at the Blogger dashboard, Google fixes it so that all internal links use the new domain, while incoming requests to the old blogspot address are redirected. When it works, it’s seamless.

Getting it to work requires setting up a canonical name (or CNAME) record on your nameserver. This was hiccup number one. My pal’s domain was registered through UKReg.com, which uses Fasthosts as a registrar, which doesn’t support CNAME records on its namesevers. A little to and fro resulted with Fasthosts’ tech support, who really weren’t interested in the problem but seemed happy with my suggestion that I’d find another registrar. I can only assume that CNAME redirects threaten to undermine hosting revenue, or something. Other registrars, such as Pipex’s 123-reg.co.uk, seem to manage this feat.

Anyway, this left two options: move to a different registrar, or simply switch nameserver supplier. The latter seemed to offer less hassle. After a bit of research, prodding and poking I settled on EveryDNS.net as a suitable free nameserver host. I went back to Fasthosts and switched nameservers, after setting up the CNAME record at EveryDNS. Pingability's Quick DNS Check service proved handy at this point. I waited a day for the world’s DNS servers to synchronise, then went to Blogger and selected the custom domain option.

A while later I tried typing in the new domain name and, amazingly, it worked. Kind of.

Previously, my pal had used Fasthosts to do simple web and email address forwarding. Requests for any of his subdomains had gone straight to his blogspot.com home page; emails to any address on his domain had gone to a GoogleMail account. Having switched nameservers, none of this worked any more. Now, only requests for the www subdomain were routed to his blog - any other subdomain request, including the root domain, returned a 404-page-not-found error. Worse, emails to any address at the domain had literally nowhere to go.

I haven’t worked out if you can set up DNS records to forward emails to a personal GMail account, but it is possible using Google Apps, so I created a new Apps account, set up appropriate email forwarding and catch-all options, and followed Google’s instructions to add its mail servers to the EveryDNS records. And after the DNS changes had filtered through to the world at large, email began trickling in again.

So I’ve kind of finished the job, and kind of haven’t. Email is working perfectly, but the site isn’t. Requests to any subdomain other than www still return a 404, including http requests to the root domain name. I’d be grateful if anyone using Blogger custom domains to better effect could drop me a line with suggestions.

At the end of the process, what struck me was how much you can currently get for nothing - if you’re prepared to weather a few ads next to your emails. Anyone running a small business can create a quite convincing web presence using nothing but a £2.95pa domain name, Blogger and Google Apps. Your end-user site won’t be troubled by other people's ads, and you won’t pay a penny in hosting fees.

No wonder Fasthosts didn’t want to play ball.