Buying And Configuring My First Domain
Tags: devops, domain, networking, devjournal
Published: 2022-08-04 17:38:20

---
title: Buying And Configuring My First Domain
published: true
date: 2022-08-04 00:00:00 UTC
tags: devops, domain, networking, devjournal 
canonical_url: https://conorsheehan1.github.io/blog/2022/08/04/buying-and-configuring-my-first-domain.html
---

Recently I made an Irish version of the New York Times [spelling bee](https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee) game. I wanted to host it on a domain that was easy to remember, but I’d never bought or configured a domain before. Here’s what I learned along the way.

## Buying the domain

First I had to choose a company to buy the domain from. I wanted a ‘.ie’ domain since it’s an Irish game, so that limited the options anyway. Initially, I was thinking of using [GoDaddy](https://www.godaddy.com), but they require a tax ID. The only Irish tax ID I know of is a PPSN, which you’re not meant to share with anyone but the government. After asking around on [r/DevelEire](https://www.reddit.com/r/DevelEire) I decided to go with [blacknight](https://www.blacknight.com). It’s an Irish company so it was simpler to buy a ‘.ie’ domain from them, and they had similar prices anyway.

Next, I had to choose a domain. I named the game [beach litríochta](https://beach-litriochta.netlify.app), which is a rough translation of spelling bee. Initially I wanted [https://beach.ie](https://beach.ie) because it’d be super easy to remember, makes sense in both English and Irish, and is kind of funny since “Beach” means bee in Irish.

![beach-meme](https://conorsheehan1.github.io/assets/images/beach_litriochta/beach_meme.webp)

I thought the domain was free, but it just had a slow redirect. It resolves to [https://beachawards.ie](ttps://beachawards.ie), so I couldn’t get it. Instead I went with [https://www.beacha.ie](https://www.beacha.ie). Beacha is the plural of beach, and it’s still short and hopefully easy to remember.

Buying the domain was pretty straight forward. I had to upload a picture of my ID to blacknight to prove I’m an Irish citizen and that was it really.

## Configuring the domain

This is where I ran into some issues. Blacknight is changing it’s control panel, so a lot of its support forum FAQs won’t work for new customers. The old control panel is at [https://cp.blacknight.com](https://cp.blacknight.com), but I was a new customer so I had to use [https://cp.blacknighthosting.com](https://cp.blacknighthosting.com).

![blacknight-control-panel](https://conorsheehan1.github.io/assets/images/beach_litriochta/blacknight_control_panel_update.png)

I already had my game hosted with Netlify, so all I needed was to forward the traffic from my new domain to Netlify. I found this [blacknight support article on domain forwarding](https://help.blacknight.com/hc/en-us/articles/212523009-Domain-Forwarding), but it was using the old blacknight control panel so I couldn’t use it.

I managed to get things working by following the [Netlify docs](https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/netlify-dns/delegate-to-netlify/), some back and forth with blacknight support, and some trial and error. Here’s what I did to set up forwarding:

### Forwarding traffic

1. Go to Netlify and select your site -> site settings -> domain management ![netlify_domain_management](https://conorsheehan1.github.io/assets/images/beach_litriochta/netlify_domain_management.png)
2. Add your custom domain(s)
3. Click the options dropdown -> Go to DNS panel ![netlify_dns_list](https://conorsheehan1.github.io/assets/images/beach_litriochta/netlify_dns_list.png)
4. Copy the 4 DNS entries from Netlify
5. Go to the [blacknight control panel](https://cp.blacknighthosting.com).
6. Click the domains dropdown -> your domain ![blacknight_domain](https://conorsheehan1.github.io/assets/images/beach_litriochta/blacknight_domain.png)
7. Click Nameservers Management ![blacknight_nameservers_management](https://conorsheehan1.github.io/assets/images/beach_litriochta/blacknight_nameservers_management.png)
8. Select custom nameservers and paste in the values you copied from Netlify. ![blacknight_custom_nameservers](https://conorsheehan1.github.io/assets/images/beach_litriochta/blacknight_custom_nameservers.png)
9. Now you have to wait “/. I left it overnight, and in the morning my domain was redirecting correctly!

If you’re interested in learning Irish or spelling games in general please check out [https://beacha.ie](https://beacha.ie)! It’s free and the code is open source [https://github.com/ConorSheehan1/beach-litriochta](https://github.com/ConorSheehan1/beach-litriochta).