Question
I'M NEW, and inexperienced: What is a droplet and how do I point GoDaddy to DigitalOcean?
- Posted on February 28, 2015
Asked by genesee
What is a droplet and how do I forward the name server on my domain to look at DigitalOcean?
Submit an answer
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!
Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in Q&A, subscribe to topics of interest, and get courses and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business.
A droplet is a Virtual Server. That’s just DigitalOcean’s cute little nickname for it.
Forwarding the Domain is super easy. Just register the domain using DigitalOcean’s super simple Domain Manager tool, add 3 NS records to your domain. The addresses are the following: ns1.digitalocean.com ns2.digitalocean.com ns3.digitalocean.com
Have fun!
In short, a droplet is a virtual server. Digital Ocean doesn’t hold back. These are full fledge, production machines that spin up very quickly.
Thing about droplets is to think of them as “disposable”. Sure, you could fire up a droplet and keep it around for ever and keep it up like you would any other machine. However, many folks use scripts to automatically create droplets, install software to use for a while, and then tear them down when they’re done. Or you could spin up a machine, install a new version of your application, then destroy the old one… there’s all sorts of possibilities.
But Digital Ocean has made is super easy to fire up and destroy droplets, so you’re only limited by your imagination.
As far as your DNS goes, you should be able to go into GoDaddy’s advance DNS settings and set up an entry to point back to Digital Ocean. So let’s say you owned a domain “blueberry.com”. You could set up a subdomain using the “NS” type:
Now example.blueberry.com would point to Digital Ocean’s name servers. Now, you’d have to go into Digital Ocean’s DNS settings and point example.blueberry.com to one of your droplets.
One thing I have NOT figured out (and would love to know) is if there is a way to dynamically update Digital Ocean’s DNS server to point to the right IP address as I bring droplets up and down.
Of course, I may answer myself by saying I could script it myself. :D