I’m regularly asked about the best way to go about building a modern website and recently I’ve been recommending those looking for the simplest/cheapest route to check out WordPress by signing up to WordPress.com. WordPress.com has been running the latest 3.0 release (see my WordPress 3.0 review) for some time now complete with new default theme and custom menu handling, which makes it far better suited to creating traditional page-based websites as well as post-based blogs.

The beauty of WordPress.com is that it makes exploring what WordPress has to offer so painless. Essentially all you need is an email address and, within a couple of minutes, you can be creating your first posts and pages, changing your theme, monitoring your stats and so on. If you like what you see, you can either stick with WordPress.com’s default free hosting package, upgrade to get your own domain name ($15 a year), redirect an existing domain ($10 a year) or, most powerfully, switch to an independent WordPress host where you’ll be able to extend the framework’s capabilities via third-party plug-ins.

Generally the response has been amazingly enthusiastic – “the difference is night and day” – especially from those owners of existing sites who had previously been paying a fortune to traditional web designers whenever they’d needed to update existing pages.

Recently, however, for one correspondent the dream descended into a nightmare…

Having created a site on WordPress.com he decided it was so good he wanted to replace his existing site with it and sent out a mailshot to advertise the fact. Unfortunately as soon as he switched to his new primary domain (ie. example.com rather than example.wordpress.com) his email stopped working.

Domain mapping, email and custom DNS

Unfortunately things are not as simple as they seem. Indeed the WordPress.com support page includes this:

Warning: Changing the name servers will make any previously setup custom DNS records such as A, CNAME, or MX records stop working. To continue using them, you’ll need to enter new Custom DNS records once you have set up your domain on WordPress.com.

Unfortunately you need to know quite a bit about DNS to realise that this is a serious issue. In particular the Mail eXchanger MX record specifies a mail server responsible for accepting email messages.

At least this pointed to the solution, namely updating the MX record in WordPress.com as discussed on a Custom DNS support page. However, with pitiful support from WordPress.com and existing host alike, this proved easier said than done, as simply adding a pointer back to the original server didn’t solve the problem.

Moreover, based on the support page’s advice that, “it can take up to 48 hours for all the DNS changes to filter through the internet. Don’t panic if it doesn’t work right away”, my correspondent naturally panicked at the prospect of tweaking settings and then having to wait two days without email to see if they had worked.

Thankfully I was able to help him find a fix. On the same page where you enter your custom DNS records, WordPress.com has provided a link to Google Apps for Domains.  This is how WordPress.com provides email handling for those registering a domain with them and, by signing up, my correspondent was able to enter the code Google provided and then click the Generate DNS records command to automatically create the necessary custom MX code to get his domain name-based email back up and running almost instantly. In fact with Outlook-based desktop access as well as webmail access, plus the other benefits of Gmail handling, he was probably better off.

To be honest, I’m not sure how big an issue this is. With well over 10 million sites hosted on WordPress.com, the site must be one of the world’s biggest hosts and domain mapping targets, and clearly most redirects haven’t gone through the same nightmare. Certainly most hosting/domain providers should have experience of how to redirect web traffic to WordPress.com without messing up email. Quite possibly my correspondent’s setup was unusual in some way and I don’t know enough about DNS or email handling to say how (hopefully more experienced readers may be able to shed more light).

However the fact that it happened at all shows that it can be an issue and one that users should be aware of before mapping their existing domain. More importantly it shows that even the simplest content management system (CMS) can occasionally turn around and bite you – failing to backup your all-important database being the prime route from dream to nightmare for those who choose independent hosting.

I still strongly believe that the enormous benefits of CMS handling far outweigh its occasional pitfalls and that the best solution for those looking to create simple sites is WordPress, and that the easiest way to explore how WordPress works and what it can do is via WordPress.com. However I’ll now include a link to this post too.