I have a fairly basic question about the DNS setup. I already pointed my nameservers from my registrar to Digital Ocean and I’m trying to be able to add records to my DNS to set up email use via my domain name, but in order to do that I need to add my domain name to the Digital Ocean DNS to be served publicly from their servers. I don’t want my domain name to be publicly accessible yet (Main reason is because of SEO-related bots), since my site won’t be up. Am I misinterpreting this assumption? Can I make the domain public without pointing it to my PTR Records?
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PTR records are used for resolving an IP to a hostname
as soon as you add your domain to the DigitalOcean DNS system, it will be live and active for the public (as long as the transfer has gone through from the registrar of course)
either way, after adding them, DigitalOcean DNS servers will properly resolve any hostnames you add to the domain under the DNS manager
Unfortunately there is not easy way to solve this. My suggestion would be to add all your DNS records and setup your email and block any bot crawler from indexing your site. you can add a robots.txt file at the root level of your site and include
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This way they won’t index any files and you still be able to work on your development site.
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