How to point GoDaddy Domains to DigitalOcean (year 2020)

Posted on April 7, 2020

Hi,

I have a domain name from GoDaddy and want to host my website on DigitalOcean. I followed instructions such as “What should my DNS be” and the default instruction “How To Point to DigitalOcean Nameservers”. Both instructions are great but outdated as GoDaddy does not let you add a custom DNS as instructed in these guides. Instead I have to change the default godaddy’s dns and I need to provide at least two individual DNS and I must assign their IPs:

    DNS           |       IP

--------------------- | ------------- ns1.digitalocean.com | 173.245.58.51 ns2.digitalocean.com | 173.245.59.41 ns3.digitalocean.com | 198.41.222.173

and the output of $ whois example.com shows that the dns is set right.

Name Server: ns1.digitalocean.com
Name Server: ns2.digitalocean.com
Name Server: ns3.digitalocean.com

Even though I have defined A and CNAME as @ and www respectively, when I ping the example.com I get nothing except:

$ ping example.com
ping: example.com: Name or service not known

Can anyone know the reason and check what I’ve missed?

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alexdo

April 8, 2020

Accepted Answer

Hello, @unitydigital

Could you please let me know when exactly did you changed your namerservers to ns1.digitalocean.com, ns2.digitalocean.com, ns3.digitalocean.com? The thing is DNS changes might take up to 48 hours in order to fully update, this is mainly due to ISP cache. Usually this happens a lot faster but you still need to wait for at least an hour or two for the DNS to properly propagate.

You can use this website - https://www.whatsmydns.net/ in order to track the DNS propagation for your domain name, just enter your domain and select A record (it’s selected by default, so you can just enter your domain and press “Search”). You can then see if the DNS propagation is ongoing or if there is clearly an issue and your DNS is not configured.

Let me know how it goes.

Regards, Alex