I have been a subscriber to Office 365 from the moment I started my own company. When I set everything up back then, I of course needed a fitting domain name. This was the domain you’re currently visiting: HendrickxConsulting.com. Microsoft offered to purchase a domain name directly from the Office 365 portal, so with an eye on limiting the number of services I needed to keep track of, this seemed like a good option.
Fast-forward to me setting up this blog. I decided to go for BlueHost.com, since they are one of the leading and widely recommended providers of hosting for a WordPress blog, and very reasonably priced. When you create a BlueHost account, you can specify wether you want to buy a domain from them or wether you bring your own. I selected to bring my own and filled in this domain name.
This means that you won’t be able to manage your domain through BlueHost, since it’s not registered at their side. They recognise the domain, but have no view on its configuration. As a result of this, https://hendrickxconsulting.com was not redirecting to this WordPress site, and the blog was only accessible on a temporary, ugly URL.
Googling around on how to properly configure my domain to point to WordPress, I didn’t find any instructions on how to do this. So I needed to figure it out myself and thought that would make for a good short first blogpost.
Configuring the Office 365 domain
First of all, you shouldn’t change anything on the side of BlueHost. Since they’re not controlling the domain, it’s irrelevant what you see on the Bluehost Domain Configuration screen. Just make sure you check that the domain name is properly listed there, as you can see in the image below.
The only thing you will need to get from your Bluehost configuration portal, is the shared IP address of your WordPress site. You can find this when you log in to BlueHost, and navigate to the Advanced section under General Information. The shared IP 162.241.217.240 is what we’re looking for.
So remember this value and head over to your Office 365 Admin site. You can find your Domain Settings under Settings -> Domains. You should be able to see a list of your domains, which in my case is Hendrickxconsulting.com and the onmicrosoft.com domain that Microsoft creates by default for every new Office 365 instance. Once you click on the domain that you want to link to BlueHost, navigate to the DNS Records tab. In there, we need to add 2 records:
- An A record or Address record: These type of records associate a domain with an IP address.
- A CNAME record: These are Alias records. They can be used to redirect one domain name to another. We’ll use a CNAME record to redirect the subdomain www.hendrickxconsulting.com to hendrickxconsulting.com.
Use the Add record button on the DNS Records tab to add those 2 records using the following values:
For the A record, the name should be @. This refers to the domain name without any prefixes, so just HendrickxConsulting.com. The value is set to the IP address which we got from the BlueHost configuration screen.
In order to fix that people can surf to this blog using the traditional www prefix, we added the CNAME record. The name was set to www and the value to hendrickxconsulting.com, so that everyone who browses to www.hendrickxconsulting.com is pointed to hendrickxconsulting.com.
The TTL or time-to-live value is the amount of time that a nameserver keeps the value cached before it will look for updates. Leaving this at the default of 1 hour is fine.
The last step… patience
So that’s all that needs to get configured in order to make BlueHost work nicely with your Office 365 domain. The last thing you need to do is wait. It can take some time before DNS changes are reflected properly because all nameservers need to get updated. In addition, BlueHost configures an SSL certificate for your site as well, and although this happens automatically, you’ll need to be patient for this to complete after modifying the DNS settings.
All in all I would tell you to sleep on it. Give it a day to work its IT magic and after that you should be good to go!