Wordpress.com to Wordpress.ord with Google domain name - major setup problems!

#1

Hi there,

I’m a total newbie to managing my own site, and am hoping for some guidance as I try to set mine up; at this point I am totally stuck and am considering giving up.

Here’s the situation. I have a blog currently on Wordpress.com. I want to migrate to Wordpress.org. I bought my preferred domain name from Google. I then signed up for hosting from DreamHost.

I used the one-click install on DreamHost to install Wordpress. I chose the custom settings. Following advice I read in a support page, I installed the Wordpress files to mydomainname.com/wp.

My installation of Wordpress via the one-click came back as successful and I received an email from DreamHost explaining what to do next to finalize the set-up. This email contained links to admin sections of my new website. However, every time I clicked on one of the links I ended up at a generic Google site that said “Welcome to [mydomainname].com”, with no dashboard or any admin privileges.

Next, following advice provided by the Google service where my domain is registered, I modified the A records in my DNS records with DreamHost. However, I still can’t get anywhere when I click on the links I received from DreamHost following my installation of Wordpress.

I hope this doesn’t sound too terribly confusing. There’s a lot of advice out there on how to do what I’m trying to do, but none of it is detailed enough (or explained clearly enough) to enable me - a newbie - to know how to solve my problem. Any insight would therefore be much appreciated.

Thanks, cowriting

#2

Don’t give up your not too far away from joy!

There wouldn’t be any reason to modify the A record on the dreamhost side. What you would do on the dreamhost side with the A-record is look up the IP address from the “non-editable entries” for your domain. You could then use that IP address to modify the A-record on the google side.

Mostly likely and even simpler option is to set the namesevers for your domain on the google side to ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com, ns3.dreamhost.com making the dreamhost nameserver the authority for your domain. Doing this will allow all the panel functions that need to update your DNS to do so. You can also set your email back to gmail if that’s what you were trying to keep at google.

In the case of EITHER option don’t expect instant joy however. DNS propagation takes time, usually 12-24 hours in the US but can take up to 3 days to be seen wordwide. This is a function of how DNS works and not part of google or dreamhosts policies.