Using SmugMug to host the content for 1and1 registered domains

Torrey wanted her new photography business domain (porchswingstudios.com) to actually point to her SmugMug website (porchswingstudios.smugmug.com).  But she didn't want to use an HTML frame, since the URL in the address bar never changes as you click through the site.  She also didn't want to use an HTTP redirect to to SmugMug since then the URL in the address bar would be the SmugMug domain instead of her business domain.  She wanted the domain to be her domain, but the content to be from SmugMug, and links should work as expected.

She has a "Power" user account on SmugMug which enables a feature called "Custom Domains" which is exactly what she was looking for.  So I read the docs up to the point where it read: "FYI: We don't support domains from 1and1." which is where we host her domain.  Well ...damn.

But they didn't mention why 1and1 wasn't supported... and I really don't like being told NO.

So I tried it anyway and guess what.. it didn't work.  I found that 1and1 only allows setting alternative DNS name servers, or a CNAME on their DNS servers, or an A record on their DNS servers.  Those are exclusive "or"s (pick one and only one) and its that xor that doesn't play nice with SmugMug since they require adding both a CNAME and an A record in DNS for the custom domain feature to work.

However, 1and1 did allow setting alternative DNS name servers so I figured I'd give that a shot.  I've never set up a DNS server before, but I remembered that the AWS service Route53 might assist with this.

And sure enough, Route53 is a hosted DNS web service which is precisely what I needed.  In 10 minutes I'd set up a "Hosted Zone" for my wife's domain, added the A record and CNAME records that SmugMug required then edited my DNS settings in 1and1 to use the 4 DNS servers that Route53 gave me.  Then I waited for my domain to start using the new name servers.  And waited... and waited... It took about 6 hours to propagate but I found stories on the web of people waiting 3 days for this to go through so it could have been worse.  I used http://who.is to verify which name servers my domain was using and once it was the Route53 servers I modified my SmugMug Account settings and set the "Custom Domain" to the new domain... and it worked.  Yay!

The downside is that its $0.50 per month to host the DNS for the domain in Route53. The additional $6 a year to make it work with SmugMug makes 1and1 more expensive than most of the other registrars I could go with.  Not to mention the hassle I had to go through to get this to work.  Maybe that's why nobody else was foolish enough to make it work when they were told NO to begin with...