Instructions
for
Achieving Total DNS Control at GoDaddy.com

More or less by default, the purchase of an account—including domain name—at GoDaddy.com gets your new domain parked on their servers and an offer to forward it (domain forwarding). If you’re not hosting your own domain (on your own web server), then you’re pretty much stuck with this arrangement.

What this means is that requests of your domain by browsers on the network reach GoDaddy.com which has your domain in a Domain Name Service, a sort of telephone book with your domain name and a computer address. There, they are redirected to the actual location of your pages whether on their servers, yours or the server of an ISP hosting your pages.

Under these circumstances, as users browse your pages, what’s displayed on the address line of their browser is obscure or useless when it comes to bookmarking or remembering something they’d like to return to or to refer others to.

Additionally, GoDaddy.com offers domain masking which corrects the above in a sense by always making the address at the top of the browser merely your domain name and nothing else no matter where the visitor browsed. Sometimes this is desirable when you do not want anyone to understand the structure of your web site. Most of the time, however, it’s simply unprofessional looking.

Total DNS Control

GoDaddy.com offers total DNS control to you allowing you to create a proper DNS reference to your domain. To benefit from this, GoDaddy.com, you and the server hosting your web pages must cooperate together. This cooperation appears mysterious and beyond mere mortals, but GoDaddy.com has taken a sufficiently big step to make it possible with the total DNS control configuration utility on their web site.

Here’s how to make use of DNS if you have your domain with GoDaddy.com. To make this example easier to demonstrate, we’re going to pretend we have a domain named xyx.com and the IP address of the web server hosting our domain’s pages is 69.169.174.12.

Setting up in GoDaddy.com...

1. First, you’ll want to unmask and unforward all those domains at GoDaddy.com’s site. If you set them up in the first place, it’s just the reverse. If you can't remember, just follow the instructions here.
    

   Log in to your GoDaddy.com account.

    

   Hover over Domains in the green bar.

    

   Click on My Domains.

    

   Click on your domain name.

    

   Click on Total DNS Control.

    

   Follow the instructions below.

Unmasking and unforwarding...

If you have never established forwarding or masking for your domain, don't worry about this topic. Just follow the instructions for Total DNS Control below.

• 1. Look for Forwarding: and click on the blue link below it. Domain is forwarded. This takes you to Domain Forwarding.
   

  2. Under Domain Forwarding, click on the Masking tab and uncheck the box entitled, Mask Domain:.

   

  3. Click on the Forwarding tab.

   

  4. Click the radio button entitled Disabled.

   

  5. At the lower right (you may need to scroll over to the right in the window), click the orange button that says OK.

Total DNS control...

1. In that same window that was up at the end of the previous set of instructions, you see again the light, green region; click in the middle of it on the blue underlined link under Total DNS: Total DNS Control and MX Records.
    

   Near the right side of this new window, click on the Advanced Mode button.

    

   Do NOT change anything except the very first field under Points To! You should change this field to contain 69.169.174.12 (instead of 66.7.114.166 as shown here which was an old IP address that is no longer correct).
   
   This is your web server’s IP address, which your ISP gave you. When you’ve done this, you should see that one line say:
   
   
   
   and none of the check boxes should be checked.

    

   Scroll down to the bottom until you see an orange button OK and click it.

That’s it. You only need to wait a few minutes. GoDaddy.com says 24-48 hours, but they’re just trying to set your expectations lower. I’ve never seen this take more than an hour.