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Making Weebly Play Nicely with GoDaddy

9/3/2013

10 Comments

 
I have been using Weebly for a while now, and I am quite happy. As a free service (with some forced self advertisement and limitations), Weebly does not offer a way to statically put files to your webpage. It makes sense as this is related to hosting, which one should be paying, but provided freely (as a subdomain of Weebly) by Weebly.

However, what if you already have a domain and hosting? In my case I already had hosting from GoDaddy and I bought a domain from GoDaddy, too. Weebly plays very nicely if you want to use your existing domain. You just have to forward your domain's IP to Weebly's IP. There are many articles, including this one.

So far so good, but what if you want to use your existing domain and continue hosting files under your domain. Well, this is the point where everything breaks down. As your domain redirects to Weebly by default, all existing files in your domain (that were uploaded by FTP) also point to Weebly, however they don't have counterparts (and cannot have) under Weebly's domain, so everything fells apart. 

At this point one can ask: why would you even need this? Well, in my case, a portion of my webpage is auto-generated from a database and the generated HTML code needs static links. When you add a file through Weebly's menu, you get a weird hashed link such as:
 http://www.kivancmuslu.com/uploads/1/8/0/4/18042401/6891725.png?135
which is almost impossible to statically encode in your HTML generator. Even if you don't generate HTML code, you could still want a static link for files that change frequently in your webpage so that you can change those files through FTP, without the need to republish your webpage. By static links, I mean something along the lines:
http://files.kivancmuslu.com/Publications/2012/MusluBHEN2012oopsla.bib
(e.g., more readable, more structural, does not change)

Now that I explained the problem, I can tell you that there is a (somewhat neat) workaround for this problem. You have to create a subdomain in your domain (I have created http://files.kivancmuslu.com and pointed it to /files folder) and then in your DNS settings make sure that your subdomain points to your actual (original) domain IP address (which should be default). Instructions to create the sub-domain (it was tricky for me to find it, even the second time). This way you should have two A-entries in your DNS management (note, this is just for verification, you do not really need to change anything manually here):
  • @ (main domain) should map to Weebly's IP (so that your webpage redirects to the page you build at Weebly).
  • files (your new subdomain) should map to your actual (original) domain address (so that whenever you link from this subdomain, it does not redirect to Weebly, but finds the file in your actual domain).
That is all I needed to do. Now I can upload whatever I need to a path under /files... and I know that I will be able to refer those in HTML using http://files.kivancmuslu.com/...

Questions or problems, let me know!
10 Comments
Frustrated weebly user
20/9/2013 02:27:35

Hello,

Just a question: Do I need a weebly pro/starter subscription to link my free weebly subdomain to godaddy?

Reply
Kivanc Muslu
29/9/2013 08:48:24

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply. No, you should not need a paid account from weebly to do this. I am currently using weebly as a free service and everything worked as I expected.

If you are having a particular problem with my tutorial, please let me know and I will try to look into it. Thanks!

Reply
MICK KNOWLES
8/10/2013 05:02:12

Hi, So I don't need to have a started account or pro, but do I need to have a .weebly.com domain to be able to point my domain hosted at go daddy to my weebly site?

Reply
Kivanc Muslu
19/10/2013 13:25:08

Yes, you only need a starter account. You do NOT need a .weely.com domain, you only need one domain (I am assuming you have one from GoDaddy). I have updated the instructions in the blog post to have a pointer to the GoDaddy support article that shows you have to create sub-domains within your domain.

Let me know if you still have problems.

Reply
IEPChicago
14/11/2013 09:23:38

Hi,

I have a question. I have a .weebly.com address (free). I recently purchased a domain name from go daddy. Will I also have to pay weebly a monthly subscription to merge the two??

Reply
Neil link
11/2/2014 11:57:16

Hi:
It looks like Weebly charges now for domain pointing. If I own a domain name at another location (InMotion Hosting for example) and want the domain to point to Weebly, it appears that I have to now pay about $4 per month. Is there any work-around for this that you are aware of?

Reply
Bob
8/3/2014 17:15:15

I have a domain brought from go daddy & a free account with weebly.com and made a free site xxxx.weebly.com).
I would like to know is there any way to link my domain to the weebly site (not just forwarding) with out buying a starter pack.

Please help

Reply
Nitesh
14/3/2014 04:05:24

Can you please explain how to add our own domain to example.weebly.com for free?

Reply
Kivanc Muslu
28/10/2015 19:55:20

Sorry for the late replies. I will try to answer all questions at once.

It might not be obvious in the post but I forward my GoDaddy domain IP to my free Weebly IP (address). This method does not require paying to Weekly and all configuration is done on GoDaddy part.

So, to address some of the concerns:
- To make GoDaddy Weebly forwarding (what this post explains), you don't need a paid Weebly account.
- This is not a link, you cannot reuse your existing domain.weebly.com address.

Reply
I just need help
3/1/2016 01:42:36

Hi, it seems I can't find a straight answer anywhere on the internet. I purchased a domain on weebly (without thinking) and I'm trying to find out if I can use that same domain name that I purchased from weebly, somewhere else? For example, if I wanted to use a different site builder or get my website professionally designed from scratch using the same domain? I know weebly doesn't want to lose customers over competition (as do all businesses), I just really need help with this. I will greatly appreciate your help. Thank you very much in advance.

Reply

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