Transferring a Canadian domain to Namecheap from Go Daddy for a Blogger custom domain

There's been a lot of recent news about Go Daddy's missteps in terms of the SOPA legislation in the USA.  I'm in Canada, but I can't help but also notice the Go Daddy business and political policies aren't terribly aligned with the business and political policies of my business practice.  Plus Go Daddy's services are focused on the up-sell than actually servicing my business needs, so I decided to transfer my domains from Go Daddy to Namecheap.

Here's the short of how I transferred the domain of this blog from Go Daddy to Namecheap, and how I had to reset things for Blogger custom domain to continue to work.

Note that doing this will cause a bit of down time for your domain name!
Steps are pretty simple to transfer the domain:

1. Ensure your domain is unlocked at Go Daddy.  Locking disallows transferral.
2. Get an EPP code from Go Daddy for your domain.  You'll need to go into the control panel of your domain at Go Daddy, and click on the "Authorization Code: Send by Email" link [1].  Make sure your email is up to date for that domain!
3. Go to Namecheap.com and go to "Transfer a Domain", and follow instructions to provide your domain and the EPP code. Namecheap will take care of the rest!

Wait until you have email confirmation from Namecheap, the CIRA, and Go Daddy that the transfer happened.

Next, you'll have to reconfigure your DNS settings.

1. Enter the "Manage Domains" control panel for your domain at Namecheap.
2. Click on "Transfer DNS to Webhost" and transfer your domain to use Namecheap's Domain Name Servers (DNS).  You'll know you've done this when you have the option to click on "All Host Records" in the left navigation bar.
3. Go to "All Host Records", and one option is to change the records to look like what's shown at Setting Blogger Custom Domain Using Namecheap.
   
   Alternatively, here's the Host Records settings I use:
   1. I like to have the "blog" sub-domain point to the URL ghs.google.com using a CNAME record.
   2. The "www" host name points to the blog.carsoncheng.ca as a URL (redirect) record.
   3. And the "@" host name (which means literally no host name, i.e. the bare carsoncheng.ca URL) points also to the blog.carsoncheng.ca as a URL (redirect) record.
   4. TTL are all set to 1800.

Finally, ensure Blogger is set up to use your custom domain name.  For me, since I use the blog.carsoncheng.ca URL as the sub-domain with the CNAME record set to point to ghs.google.com, I follow Google's instructions to set that as the URL to host this blog.

The settings at Blogger or Google's servers can take up to an hour to update its records, and in the mean time, your domain might not work.

Namecheap has more information about how to set Host Records.  Google offers a way for you to double check what your CNAME record looks like.

[1] Godaddy EPP Code