Cloudflare: Pointing subdomains to a different droplets?

May 24, 2017 4.3k views
Networking DNS Ubuntu 16.04
848409b576c48165e4df76e9409ea815850df926
By:
juanra

Hi,

I have my main domain.com pointing to 1.2.3.4 droplet. Now I want to set my new app.domain.com to 5.6.7.8 droplet using CloudFlare.

For this I created an A record with the name app and the value 5.6.7.8, but for some reason when I check the DNS propagation or when I ping app.domain.com, it still resolves to 1.2.3.4.

This is my current configuration:

Type Name Value TTL
A app points to 5.6.7.8 Automatic

A domain.com points to 1.2.3.4 Automatic

A www points to 1.2.3.4 Automatic

Any idea of why this may be happening?

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1 Answer
jtittle1 May 25, 2017

@juanra

Generally what I’d recommend setting up is:

A          domain.com   DROPLET_01_IP
CNAME      www          domain.com

A          app          DROPLET_02_IP
CNAME      www.app      app.domain.com

DROPLET_01_IP = 1.2.3.4

DROPLET_02_IP = 5.6.7.8

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  • juanra May 25, 2017

    This works perfectly. Thank you very much. Do you have any idea why the ww.app record is necessary?

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    • jtittle1 May 25, 2017

      @juanra

      It all depends on setup.

      If there’s something in your config using www or www.app, then you’d need those entries – even if it’s a redirect. Generally it’s always a good idea to setup the www variant as it’s a common use URL. Many may type it in before they type in your address without it, thus if it’s not properly setup, it could error out or just not work at all – the end result, you lose some degree of potential traffic and/or customers (if you’re selling something).

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      • nialla April 8, 2018

        Hi guys, I am having a very similar issue.

        I have a domain set up on cloudflare and the main site is working fine.
        I currently have a marketing site set up on that, hosted on webflow.

        I would like to set up two subdomains to host an associated web app that I have built.
        I.e. from the marketing site at (www).example.com a user can click and go to app.example.com.
        The two subdomains must do the following

        • One subdomain (app.example.com) should points to Digital Ocean Space that hosts the app’s frontend code. The address of the Space on DO has the form of:
          xyz.abc.digitaloceanspaces.com i.e. it is not an IP address.

        • Another (backend.example.com) which points to the floating IP of the Digital Ocean Droplet which is hosting the backend server code for the web app.

        How should I set these two subdomains up successfully?

        When I tried, following the advice above, I received the following error when I checked the site app.example.com:
        it keeps redirecting in a loop.

        I am getting tired of this.
        I think I will replace Cloudflare and Digital Ocean with Netlify, it seems much more straightforward.

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