Wow, this thread is simultaneously timely yet thoroughly confusing. I am in a similar situation to the OP (John-Simpson) , I previously had my own separate hosting arrangement through a third party, but recently migrated over to a Power account with JAlbum hosting. I still have control of my domain name, which is now under the scope of Cloudflare, where I can change all of the DNS records (A, CNAME, etc...). I have no concern with "messing up" any other DNS settings (MX, etc...) as they are no longer relevant/no longer exist....the previous hosting situation is now expired and no longer active. This is now "purely" a domain name only, which I wish to point to my JAlbum hosting.

Within the JAlbum settings, I understood that I needed to add the base domain name (@) and (www) records to point (link) to the root of my domain, but what exactly do I need to do over at Cloudflare? I tried adding an "A" record to point my domain to the IP that registers as the address of my JAlbum site, and adding a CNAME that adds the resolution of the "www" address, but am still failing to get anywhere (still shows as a "red" non-linked status on the JAlbum settings page and does not resolve).

The previous linked/attached screenshots are only partially helpful, as we don't know what settings and IP addresses were newly added/changed in those.

I now see that requests to your domain goes to Cloudflare and they in turn fetch the data from us, so it does work.
However, this will fool the IP check we have, so our system thinks the domains points to the wrong IP. And if it continues to fail it will eventually remove your domains from our system.

However, I don't think you actually need to add your domains to our system. I would assume Cloudflare fetches your files using the jsbeddow.jalbum.net domain, so our system actually can we unaware that the visitor is using another domain.

Frankly, this is looking like a disaster from my perspective: I have all my albums that are hosted on JAlbum listed as "private" or "hidden" by default, as I didn't want them to be visible to random visitors. Now, when I do login to my JAlbum account, I can see my albums (well only one is actually available, as it is a newly created test one that really is newly hosted by JAlbum hosting, the older ones are broken links to the old ones previously hosted by my old hosting company).

However, if I am simply given the base address like a visitor would be (jsbeddow.jalbum.net) and not logged-in, nothing is visible ("Sandrine & James Beddow hasn't uploaded any albums yet.
Have a look in the Explore section instead!"). I presume it would be the same once the Cloudflare redirects from my domain name start working as well.

I'm starting to wonder if it wasn't a mistake to buy the native JAlbum hosting, I think I was better off for years before with an independent hosting company, but their pricing went up recently.

Edited by: jsbeddow on 26 Aug 2024, 03:01

No, you misunderstood, that part wasn't a complaint, I am well aware that the old links won't work without re-uploading them to the new hosting. No problem. But I do have an issue that the entire subject of "domain linking" is poorly documented and really hard to understand what good it does. I used to be able to give out sharable links that were in the format of www.my-example-domain.com/My_Album_of Family_reunion/, and the user was directed to a clean page with just the content that I created, without a breadcrumb system back to my home page and the generic JAlbum user page.

Now, I'm not sure how I can make that work, or if I will still need to share links to the more "native" jsbeddow.jalbum.net/ format.

You can do exactly the same thing using regular jAlbum hosting. Edit your settings, and choose Use portfolio mode. That gets rid of all the jAlbum "breadcrumb" stuff. For example:

https://jefftucker.jalbum.net/skins/

In your case, it might not be worth messing around with the A names, C names, and so on. Just go to your domain registrar and put in a simple domain redirect. Someone entering:

https://jsbeddow.com/familypets

will be automatically redirected to:

https://jsbeddow.jalbum.net/familypets

The difference between that and the more elaborate routines to host your domain here is that the jAlbum address will be shown in the browser's address bar. But maybe that's OK?

Have you changed the A record for each of your domains to the IP of 16.170.197.84 ? (I don't think that is specific for me, but points to jAlbum.net.)

Yes, I have tried that, unfortunately what it resulted in was a redirect to the home page of JAlbum.net, it hasn't helped in getting to my pages.

Then add each of your domains to jAlbum in your account settings so that they are directed to the folder holding your website. My changeover was almost instant.

Er, what do you mean by "the folder holding your website"? - I no longer have any content (website) hosted elsewhere, this domain name is strictly for redirecting to JAlbum hosted albums.

Yes, I believe that is exactly what it should do for each of your domain names.

Each of your Domain names should point to a folder holding your website within the jsbeddow.jalbum.net folder on-line.

The hierarchy is:

• jsbeddow.jalbum
  • folder containing cats album
  • folder containing dogs album
  • folder containing cars album
  • folder containing family album

In the above example, each would be generated by a separate jAlbum.

I attach a screenshot of my upload manager.

The Family_Images doesn't have a domain name but the other 3 have different domains pointing to them.

i.e. legsreunited.org.uk points to the legsreunited folder

I also attach a screenshot of my settings on jAlbum.net showing the 3 connected domains.

I hope that helps?

Edited by: John-Simpson on 26 Aug 2024, 17:03

Interesting...I had not considered the NEED to make subfolders explicitly (as it is listed as an optional feature on the JAlbum settings page). Regardless, I have yet to ever see the green checkmarks next to the domain names that I add to the settings page, despite trying multiple versions of this setup (adding an "A" name to IP address mapping on Cloudflare, and/or CNAME mappings). Something still isn't right, and I have waited at least a couple of hours for each test version to propagate through DNS.