Help with Simple DNS Configuration

Hi !

I went to check your blog, and I can see your website only by surfing by its ip address.

So in your case, you can experience trouble with either DNS propagation, or Apache configuration for your virtualhost.

If you want to check for a DNS resolution, you can use the ‘dig’ command tool, the DNS swiss army knife. Let see if embark-church.org is pointing well to your IP address ( 104.131.52.152 ) :

dig +short embark-church.org
104.131.52.152

Sounds to be OK on that side. So, going with a browser to your website should work unless your virtualhost configuration is wrong. Let’s check what is going on here :

curl -I http://embark-church.org
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 14:44:06 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.9-1ubuntu4
Set-Cookie: wfvt_4129035792=540f12368f8b8; expires=Tue, 09-Sep-2014 15:14:06 GMT; Max-Age=1800; path=/; httponly
X-Pingback: http://www.embark-church.org/xmlrpc.php
Location: http://www.embark-church.org/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

It looks like your Apache configuration is doing a HTTP 301 (permanent) redirection to www.embark-church.org. But, is your subdomain pointing well to your droplet IP ? You can check it again with dig :

dig +short www.embark-church.org
--> empty response means no record !!!!

Your trouble may come from the fact you don’t have any DNS record to point the www subdomain for the domain embark-church.org !

You can issue that case by adding a new DNS record from your digitalocean admin panel , so that the subdomain ‘www’ points well your IP.

I hope this could be helpful to you. Feel free to tell if if it solved your issue ;)

See ya and enjoy all those incredible and amazing cloud solutions !

– rustx