I want to change my domain from domain A to domain B but immediately use domain A for another purpose eg an e-commerce store.
Does anyone know how best to do this?
I use Ghost pro
You’re going to need to edit your DNS at whatever company hosts your DNS (that’s probably but not necessarily your domain registrar). You’ll point A to the new address, and you’ll point B to the Ghost address. Then you’ll go into the Ghost Pro admin link (from /ghost) and tell it about your new custom domain. (<-- This one sentence is the only thing that has anything to do with Ghost. :) )
You can improve the odds of things changing quickly by going into your DNS host’s panel right now and setting the time-to-live (TTL) to something short, like five minutes. If it’s set to several hours, that means that the changes you make can take several hours to show up, because DNS gets cached in lots of places. So I’d change all the TTLs first, then wait about twice the longest of the original TTL values before making any changes, to improve the odds of all changes going through in five minutes.
(Once you’ve got everything perfect, then you turn the TTL time back up so that your website visitors aren’t waiting for a fresh lookup so often. But short TTLs make it much easier to get DNS changes done without a bunch of time spent wondering if you’ve made a mistake or are just waiting on propagation.)
Don’t forget to check for any mail settings on any domains you’re going to change, before you make any DNS changes. If you have MX records, you’re probably OK, just don’t change them. If you don’t have MX records but are receiving email at an address for that domain, you’re currently relying on the A or CNAME record to get that mail delivered, and you’ll break your email when you change those values. (If you don’t have email to anyone@yourdomain.tld, then you can ignore this.)
Cathy since you know this stuff so well. I’ve just purchased a new domain. I want to swap over to that one for my site but still have the old domain also take you to the new domain. All hosted at cloudflare.
Are you on Ghost Pro, JD?
I would set up Ghost Pro for whatever you’re thinking is your ‘main’ domain, following their regular Cloudflare directions:
Then I’d also add this, for the ‘other’ domain:
Redirect one domain to another · Cloudflare Fundamentals docs
Thanks all for responding - I managed to do this and worked well thansk
Hi I’m new to ghost and just successfully pointed custom domain (DNS hosted on namecheap) to ghost and the site looks good. Unfortunately I hadn’t read a post like this one before doing so as it relates to mail records. I have an email account setup with that org through a hosting plan at namecheap. I was wondering if anyone could let me know what SPF record I should add to my DNS on namecheap to allow the email to work as it is currently being blocked outbound (I can receive email). TIA for any assistance.
Are you self hosting or on Ghost Pro or another provider?
I’m doing the trial of ghost pro now and will convert to the lowest paid plan at end of the trial. Thanks for your guidance.
What about if I want to change domain while I am self-hosting (droplet digitalocean)? I noticed ghost asks you for your domain link during installation on vps, how to change that? Of course I need to change DNS in my domain provider panel, too.
You’re going to need to get into the shell (i.e. ssh) and then run the ghost-cli. See this:
(Last example in that section shows changing the URL.)
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