Reminder: Your Branded Short Domain must be 15 characters or less, including the dot.
Once you have purchased a BSD you’ll need to login into your bitly account and your BSD domain registrar site to set up your BSD with your bitly account.
1) Setting your DNS Settings to Bitly’s IP
The Domain Name System (DNS) is what allows a web browser to translate a domain to a website. You will need to tell DNS that your custom domain now should point to Bitly.
The way you update DNS varies depending on your domain registrar. In general, the process goes something like this:
- Log into your domain registrar's website.
- Select the Branded Short Domain you want to modify.
- Find the section for managing DNS entries. The name of this section varies, but is usually something like DNS Configuration, DNS Records, or Advanced DNS. Links to instructions for popular hosting providers can be found here.
Depending on whether you are setting up a domain or subdomain your next steps will vary.
For a domain:
Edit the existing A Records for your site and change the IP addresses to 67.199.248.12 and 67.199.248.13. If there is one or no existing A Record, add new ones.
Edit the A Record’s Hostname to the character “@” or your base domain (both mean the same thing). If you have additional A Records pointing to other IP addresses, remove all others and leave only the ones pointing to Bitly's IP addresses.
For a subdomain (such as on.wsj.com):
Edit the existing CNAME Record for that subdomain to point to cname.bitly.com. When entering your subdomain, enter only the portion before the first dot. For example, with ‘on.wsj.com’ you would just type in ‘on’.
Note: In your DNS, you can also add a ‘www’ entry for your domain name, which you will point to 'cname.bitly.com'. For example, if your Branded Short Domain was 'fred.me' you'd point your CNAME Record for 'www.fred.me' to 'cname.bitly.com.'