Question
How do I set up a single subdomain to point to my droplet?
I have my domain at NameCheap (let’s assume it’s example.com) and my DNS is all managed by NameCheap and I really don’t want to change that. Now let’s assume I have a droplet at 1.2.3.4. What I’m trying to accomplish is point a single subdomain to my droplet, for instance, vps.example.com.
From what I could gather researching my problem I eventually created an A record on NameCheap’s DNS and pointed it to 1.2.3.4. But I’m assuming this is not enough because this IP is shared across many other droplets, right? Somehow it needs to know how to point to my droplet and not someone else’s.
I supposed that now I need to add the example.com domain to my droplet, correct? By default, I get the following DNS configuration on DigitalOcean:
- A @ 1.2.3.4
- NS ns1.digitalocean.com.
- NS ns2.digitalocean.com.
- NS ns3.digitalocean.com.
Now my questions…
- Do I need the “@” record above if I simply want to have vps.example.com pointing to my droplet? Or can I simply replace the A record “@” with “vps”? Or maybe I need both?
- Do I really need to have all the NS entries above or just some A record(s)?
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You need to change your NameServers to DigitalOceans (How to change NameServers with NameCheap ) if you want to use the intigrated DNS panel (not required, just more convenient in my opnion). The “@” is the same as putting “example.com”. If you want to point the domain to “vps.example.com” you need to change the “@” to “vps” and put the IP of your server in the other field. You can remove the record with just the “@” if you dont want the root domain “example.com” to point to anything. You don’t need to use the intigrated DNS panel at all if you chose to use the NameCheap DNS panel.