MacMost Now 204: Setting Up a Personal Domain With MobileMe

You can use your own domain name with your MobileMe service. This tutorial shows you how to set it up on the MobileMe service side and the domain registrar side.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Gary Rosenzweig: Hi, this is Gary for MacMost Now. Today let's learn how to use a personal domain with your MobileMe website. 
Now I believe that everybody who has a web presence, whether it's MobileMe or one of the free blogging services, should have their own domain name. It doesn't really cost much at all and without having one it's like introducing yourself using someone else's name. 
So go to a web registrar of your choice, anyone you want, spend eight or ten bucks and get your own domain name. Make it something funny, make it your name, make it anything you want. But get one and apply it to your service, like MobileMe. 
Now MobileMe lets you set up a website and most people do this using the iWeb application. There's a lot of different options and you can create some pretty cool websites. But when you're done what you have is a website at web.me.com/yourusername, which is no good. You should have your own domain name. 
So after you register your domain name at your registrar, here's what you do to set it up as your domain name. So you log into your MobileMe account, go to me.com, log in, click on the account information icon at the top, which is the furthest one to the right, it looks like a little shadow person. 
Then you click on the left for personal domain and you get the screen where you can enter your personal domain. So you're going to enter in the domain name that you registered like example.com here. Confirm that and then you're ready to go on to the next step. 
Now you've got a screen of information from MobileMe telling you to go to your domain registrar and change the Cname to .2www.me.com. Let's look at how to do that. 
So let's GoDaddy as an example, since it seems to be the most popular registrar at the moment. You go into your account and you find the domain name that you assigned to your .com website. You go ahead to edit the information about that and you'll find a lot of different things there, but what you want to do is edit the DNS records. In GoDaddy's case it's called the total DNS. 
When you get to that part you'll see a bunch of different information there and you want to ahead and click to edit that. When you edit it you come to another screen with bits of different information about your DNS. DNS stand for 'domain name server'. You want to look for the CNames and you want to look for the www CName. You want to go ahead and use the account editing there to edit it and change it to web.me.com.
Now here's the thing about making changes to your domain name: it doesn't happen right away. You see, there's domain name servers all over the internet and they all need to be updated for everybody to see your website using that domain name. 
So when you make the domain name change at your registrar, what will happen is slowly but surely over the next 48 hours, all the domain name servers in the world will update to know that that domain points to your domain name website. 
So for you it just takes one domain name server that you're representing to actually see your new domain. It could happen in the next hour, it could take two days. It's really hard to tell. Once that happens people will be able to go to www.whatever your domain is.com and then go to your MobileMe website. 
Now if you want to go ahead and have it work without the www it's a little trickier. Every domain name registrar is different. In GoDaddy's case there's something called forwarding and you can actually set your entire domain name to forward to the www account. 
So in other words, if somebody types in 'example.com' it will go to www.example.com which is your MobileMe account. There's a lot of different tutorials at different domain registrars about this. 
Now if you're still having trouble and you're not using GoDaddy, well there's a lot of different tutorials out there. As a matter of fact, the best place to look has most of the domain name registrars have forums where people discuss different issues that they have. Everyone at this point has a discussion about how to set up MobileMe. 
So go ahead and look in your forums for your domain name registrar to set it up. 
Once you've done that, you can then proudly point people to your domain name that you own and goes to your MobileMe website. Another great advantage of this is if you decide to switch -- say go to a more advanced web solution -- you can take your domain name with you and point it at your new website so you don't have to tell everybody where your new web address is. You can simply point your new domain name to your site and it's all taken care of. 
Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 11 Responses to “MacMost Now 204: Setting Up a Personal Domain With MobileMe”

Phillip

15 years ago

Is there anyway to have 2 created sites in iWeb and have one publish to personal domain while another publishes to Mobileme?

Gary Rosenzweig

No. For that, you should move to a regular Web host. Plenty of them to choose from.

Michelle

THANK-YOU, THANK-YOU, THANK-YOU!

14 years ago

Hi Gary,
I have my domain registered on yahoo. My problem is that when typing http://mydomain.com is getting forwarded to web.me.com
Can you help me on this, I really appreciate your time and consideration.

Macmost fan from Barcelona, Spain

I'm not sure I can help here as I've never used Yahoo as a domain registrar. But as long as you set the Cname to point to where I mention in the video, you should be set.

Mitch Bradt

Thanks for this tutorial. I have a related question. When I send an email from my MobileMe account, the email From: and Reply To: are mitchbradt@me.com I'd like to have my emails appear to come from my registered domain, e.g. bradt@modernpowerengineering.com
I have this registered with GoDaddy with email forwarding to the MobileMe account, so if someone sends to this email it does get to me, but I cann't make it look like my business's email when I send.
Thanks for your help.

I'm pretty sure there is no way to do that with MobileMe. You can't make the email look like it is coming from somewhere it is not.
Your only solution would be to use an email account at your domain.

Jason

Ok so I am using dreamweaver and a little bit of notepad to make my site and I needed to figure out my ftp server and such...so on mobile me is there such a thing or do I have to get a different host?

You just use iDisk (windows in the Finder) to transfer files with MobileMe. So, no FTP, no. But Dreamweaver should still have a way to produce the files locally and then you drag and drop. Or, maybe you can even produce it directly to the iDisk location. I've never tried. Been years since I've used Dreamweaver.

Tom Hicks

13 years ago

Video 204:
When at the registar do I change the CNAME to... ???
http://www.me.com
http://www.web.me.com
me.com
web.me.com

When? I'm not sure what you mean. You change it when you want to use this feature.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 204: Setting Up a Personal Domain With MobileMe

Comments: 11 Responses to “MacMost Now 204: Setting Up a Personal Domain With MobileMe”

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