IP Connects But Domain Results in 'ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED'?

Posted on August 9, 2021

Back-end newbie here who hasn’t been able to solve this with search-fu.

The site is working when accessed via the IP address but not the domain-- going to the domain returns ‘ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED’.

I set up a PhpMyAdmin droplet. Domain nameservers are all on digital ocean and I have one ‘A’ record setup pointing at the IP. Domain is pointing to the correct IP on WhatsMyDNS. HTTP and HTTPS ports are allowed in UFW.

Anyone have insight on what I need to do to get this working? Thanks!

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psnapier

August 30, 2021

Accepted Answer

An update on what I’ve figured out for anyone who might happen to have a similar issue and stumble upon this post:

I learned that I needed to setup the domain in apache (/etc/apache2/, sites-available and sites-enabled), but it didn’t seem to fix it. Tried LAMP installs and a PLESK install and none of those worked. Went back to a LAMP install and reverted the domain nameservers back to where I purchased the domain (Hover), didn’t seem to work.

Then poking around this morning I went to the domain in Edge and it worked there. Still didn’t work in Brave even after clearing the cache.

Turns out it was the automatic HTTPS upgrade-- I had to disable that and also clear all instances of the domain from my history. Working now! :P

Bobby Iliev

August 9, 2021

Hi there @psnapier,

I could suggest adding a CNAME record for your www version to point to your domain name.

If this does not work, what I could suggest is verifying that your A record points to the correct IP address.

Also, keep in mind that it might take up to a few hours for the DNS cache to clear over the Globe, so for example, if you’ve visited the domain via your browser before adding the A record, it is possible that you might have to wait a bit. To verify that, you could try pinging the domain: