IT Milk: entry

Ning, where you can create your own social network for free, makes you pay $4.95 per month to use your own domain name. This is part of their Premium Features package that includes buying more bandwidth and buying the rights to the Adsense advertisements. I wouldn’t normally let someone extort that much money out of me for using their proprietary software, but I am so deeply in love with Ning, as I will explain in a future post, that I want to hand the developers my money as a token of thanks.

The domain name that I bought was NewCadet.com, which is now perfectly mapped to my Ning social network for service academy candidates (even the non-www url is properly forwarded for SEO). Below, I will show you some guidelines on how I got my premium domain correctly mapped to Ning.

Total DNS Control

Since everything must be hosted on the Ning servers, you have to use your registrar’s Total DNS Control to map your premium domain name to your Ning site. In my case, I use GoDaddy for all my domain registering needs.

Here are two links to ensure that your premium domain name is properly mapped to Ning. The short tutorial on Ning is incomplete, and I was having a lot of trouble with getting this to work until I scavenged through the Ning Network Creators forum.

First, when you access Total DNS Control in GoDaddy, do not touch the A (Host) name. Even though that host name will cause your domain name to show the registrar parking page, we need to keep the A (Host) name intact to properly take advantage of GoDaddy’s domain forwarding service.

With that said, read this tutorial on Domain Mapping Walkthrough with GoDaddy. If you don’t use GoDaddy or if you want more reference on using the premium domain name on Ning, check out this thread about Domain Aliasing. These links will show you how to modify your Total DNS Control table and forward the non-www version of your premium domain to the www version (to avoid duplicate content issues on search engines).

Now redirect your Ning address to your premium domain name

One problem that you now have is that people can access your site from both the Ning address and the premium domain name. For instance, before I fixed it, I could load my site in two separate instances at www.newcadet.com and getintoacademy.ning.com. I don’t want that for two reasons:

1. Our members will be confused about which address to use and link to
2. More duplicate content issues for the search engines

So, now, follow this comprehensive guide on how to 301 redirect your Ning address to your premium domain name. Ning actually allows you to modify the source code, so you will add a simple snippet of PHP code that will 301 redirect users if they access the site with the Ning url.

Thanks to Phil McCluskey at Ning for his awesome support on the Ning Network Creators forum!