Assign a Custom Domain Name to Your Website
Lesson 1 of 1
  1. 1
    What is a domain name?
    In the last unit, you deployed your site and GitHub Pages assigned your site a default URL, or domain name. In this unit, you’ll purchase your own custom domain name and assign it to your GitHub …
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  2. 2
    Custom Domain I
    Often, the most time consuming part of buying a domain name is actually deciding what you’d like it to be. Be aware that not all domain names are available; many have already been claimed by others…
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  3. 3
    Custom Domain II
    AWS offers many services used for web development like servers, databases, and networking configuration. If you’re new to using AWS it’s easy to feel overwhelmed at first by all that it can offer,…
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  4. 4
    Custom Domain III
    Now it’s time to select a domain name and make sure it’s available. Route 53 allows you to search the availability of a domain name you have in mind. It also offers many suffixes, like .com, .io, …
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  5. 5
    Setting Up Your Custom Domain
    Congrats — you’re the proud owner of a custom domain name! You might notice, however, that your new domain name doesn’t work yet — you can’t visit it in your web browser. We have to c…
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  6. 6
    Access Your Hosted Zone
    The new CNAME file in your repo informs GitHub that you’re assigning a new custom domain name to your GitHub Pages site. Next, we have to let the rest of the Internet know that we want to associa…
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  7. 7
    Confirm NS Record
    Domain names are associated with the correct DNS records by setting the domain name’s name servers. After a domain name is typed into a browser, the computer first retrieves the name servers th…
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  8. 8
    Create an A record
    Now that your domain name is associated with the correct name servers, it’s time to create some additional DNS records within the Hosted Zone. The records that we’ll create will be used by the na…
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  9. 9
    Create a CNAME record
    When setting up a website, it’s also conventional to also set up a www subdomain. www stands for world wide web. Subdomains are part of a main (or root) domain. For example, www.yourcustomdomain.c…
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  10. 10
    DNS Overview
    Let’s review your DNS setup so far. In Route 53, your domain name’s Hosted Zone contains the following: 1. The NS (Name Server) record for your domain name. When a domain name is typed into a bro…
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  11. 11
    Testing your CNAME record
    You’ve now created two DNS records: an A record for yourcustomdomain.com and a CNAME record for www.yourcustomdomain.com. Let’s make sure they both work.
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  12. 12
    Review
    Congratulations! You now have a static site with a custom domain name published on the Internet. Let’s review the process we followed in this lesson: 1. Created an AWS account and accessed Route…
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