Hi there,

Welcome the DigitalOcean community!

What I could suggest in this case is:

• As you mentioned add an A record for your subdomain name to point the Droplet’s IP address. After that note that it could take up to a 24/48 hours for the DNS cache to clear over the Globe before you could see the new recrod

• Then on your server, I would recommend using Nginx as a reverse proxy, so that when you visit your subdomain name in your browser, you don’t have to type the port after that.

To install Nginx you can follow the steps here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-nginx-on-ubuntu-20-04

After that you can use the following configuration:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name your_domain.com;
    root /var/www/html;

    index index.html index.htm index.php;

<^>    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:5001;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    }<^>

}

For more details on how to setup NodeJS for production, I would recommend this tutorial here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-node-js-application-for-production-on-ubuntu-16-04

Regards,
Bobby