Setting Up Your CO.CC Zone Records

This post is an instruction in setting-up your CO.CC (sub) domain's Zone Records. If you do not have a CO.CC domain yet, you can get one here for free (if it qualifies as a free subdomain of CO.CC)... and be able to have an almost total control with this domain without any ads or banners whatsoever. Currently you can register a maximum of two CO.CC domains. It is actually a subdomain of the co.cc top-level domain, but a domain nonetheless and a short one too ;-)

There are three ways to make your CO.CC domain point at your web site. First is by pointing your domain's nameservers to the nameservers of your site's web host. Second is by editing the zone's A, MX, NS and CNAME records. And third, is by redirecting to your site. I shall talk about the second option... the zone records.

When I say that you have almost total control of your free CO.CC domain, what I mean is that you can change/edit the most useful parts of the zone records without going to the hassles of the common ones which will be handled by your hosting company or by CO.CC themselves. You don't need to edit the SOA, or make reverse-ip entries.

What you need is just the ip address of the site which you are going to point to. This is usually a shared ip address for all the users in the server and you need to park your domain to make it point to your actual account in the hosts (unless it's a dedicated hosting or you have a static ip address for your site). You can get the ip for your site by doing a DNS whois or lookup, or it may be written somewhere on your control panel depending on your hosting. There are many online whois tools available like in DNSstuff.com, or just do a search for something like "online whois".

So let's say the ip to your site is 74.86.133.24 (from x10hosting.com) and your free domain is example.co.cc (currently for sale at CO.CC). Go to your CO.CC account panel and choose Manage Domain, select the second option which is Zone Record. Add "example.co.cc" for host, 1D TTL (1-day time to live, default), A type record and enter the ip address 74.86.133.24 as value. After that, you wait for the dns to propagate (usually 1-2 days, sometimes much shorter) and it will then point to your site if you parked the domain or created a hosting account with "use my domain" option earlier in your web host. The "www" subdomain (www.example.co.cc) is usually entered as a CNAME of the domain example.co.cc but that is not currently allowed in your CO.CC account. So if you add an A record for www.example.co.cc with the ip of your site then example.co.cc will cease to function.

If you use google apps, you can enter MX records as well in your domain's zone records with these values:

(host - TTL - MX type - MX priority - value)

example.co.cc - 1D - MX - 1 - aspmx.l.google.com
example.co.cc - 1D - MX - 5 - alt1.aspmx.l.google.com
example.co.cc - 1D - MX - 5 - alt2.aspmx.l.google.com
example.co.cc - 1D - MX - 10 - aspmx2.googlemail.com
example.co.cc - 1D - MX - 10 - aspmx3.googlemail.com
example.co.cc - 1D - MX - 10 - aspmx4.googlemail.com
example.co.cc - 1D - MX - 10 - aspmx5.googlemail.com

You would also be required by google to verify that you own the domain by creating a CNAME to google.com using a subdomain. Example will be googleffffffxhdksld.example.co.cc which must point to google.com for your google apps account to be verified. So for the host enter googleffffffxhdksld.example.co.cc, 1D for TTL (default), CNAME for type, and google.com for the value. You may want to change your email (or docs/calendar/sites/etc..) URLs in google apps so that you just type mail.example.co.cc by adding a CNAME (same as above) with mail.example.co.cc as host and ghs.google.com as value.

You can also give subdomains to your friends like myfriend1.example.co.cc to point to your friend's site. Just modify the A record with your friend site's ip and give your friend a subdomain in the host field.

Setting up NS records for your zone is just the same as the first option, but your zone details might be modified by the server it is pointing. If you do a DNS lookup for your domain, NS entries should just point to CO.CC's nameservers by default.

With an almost total control of the Zone Records, you can have blog.example.co.cc point to your blog in blogspot.com, example.co.cc pointing to your cool site hosted at x10hosting.com, use the email address yourname@example.co.cc with google apps and maybe serve other subdomains pointing to different hosting!