Free Website for Lifetime: Host your custom .np domain with Medium

Congratulations on your decision to move your .np domain to Medium! Now you are all set to enjoy the world class publishing platform for free and since, your .np domain is also free, you get free website for lifetime. And they said, you don’t get good thing in life for free — duh!!

Mercantile provides free .np domain to all Nepalese citizens and legal entities. Like other paid hosting providers, it has added feature for online editing of nameservers. However, unlike other paid providers, the DNS server editing is pretty basic. You only get to change the nameserver and that’s it. If you need to make changes to CNAME or A records, like say for subscribing to G suite or host your domain in Medium or blogger, or simply to redirect your .np domain another top-level domain, you are out of luck. But that’s until now :)

This tutorial explains how to add DNS server features not provided by Mercantile, by using a free service freedns.afraid.org.

Step 1: Point the nameserver of your .np domain to afraid.org

Log into your Mercantile domain management and update the nameservers of your domain to point to ns1.afraid.org, ns2.afraid.org, ns3.afraid.org or ns4.afraid.org.

Mercantile usually takes one business day to accept the change. Be sure to upload all the necessary documents, or they will email you back to send the required documents.

Step 2: Signup and activate an account with freedns.afraid.org

Step 3: Add a domain to your account

Once you have your account at freedns.afraid.org, now is the time to add your .np account to your account. Go to Add domains and make sure that you choose Shared:Private if you don’t want other to be able to use your domain to host their subdomain.

Step 4: Sign up for custom domain with Medium

Once you decide to host your custom domain with Medium, fill out this form to request settings to make the move. As outlined in this article, you need to add 12 A records and one CNAME record to your domain. Medium will send you the details of the CNAME and A record in an email.

Step 5: Add the CNAME record to your domain

(Note that in my screenshots of freedns.afraid.org, it says broken because I wrote this tutorial immediately after I made the changes, and Mercantile had yet to make the changes to the nameserver. You don’t need to have the changes in Mercantile be made to be able to edit the entries in Freedns.afraid.org.)

In order to add CNAME record, go to subdomains>>add. Note that this is slightly different from what’s in the email. You need to add the CNAME domain to the “subdomain” field and CNAME target to the “destination” field. Fill it out as shown in the screenshot below. One thing to note is that, you don’t need to add your custom domain.np after the CNAME token (which is the alphanumeric string before your domain name in the email). For e.g., it said in my email,

CNAME Domain (may also be called “Host” or “Name”): 3d90256f18253f6c27244006211508f2.digitalmedicine.com.np

You just have to add the alphanumeric token to the domain and not the whole thing (see the screenshot below). However, you need to add the whole of the target url i.e.,

CNAME Target (may also be marked “Points to” or “Value”): deafac89b2ccfefcb945cf41bda9a744e2019527.comodoca.com

Step 6: Add A record to the domain

Again go to subdomains>>add and enter the 12 A record IP address that you received in the Medium email. You need to add one record at a time for each of the 12 A records.

And that’s it. Now sit back and wait for Mercantile to approve your nameserver change request and then for the Medium to get an SSL certificate for your .np custom domain. In the meantime, if you were using WordPress to host your blog, you can bulk import your contents into Medium.