Question on setting Digital Ocean nameservers in Route 53

August 3, 2014 9k

By:

brad745281

Thank you for taking the time to read this, I've recently decided to move from AWS over to DO and I believe I am having a bit of trouble with setting my nameservers to point to DO in route 53.

The issue that leads me to believe this is that I have set up a droplet with dokku and when I try to IP Address / specified subdomain, I get "This Webpage is not available" - preventing me from actually setting up dokku.

Right now I have a hosted zone using Amazon's nameservers and wish to get a subdomain on Digital Ocean's name servers. In Route 53, I added an A type Record Set pointing at my DO droplet's IP and added an NS Record Set listing the 3 DO nameservers that were specified in my droplet.

Really not sure what else could be the issue here, any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

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5 Answers

numline1 August 4, 2014

Hello Brad,

you can keep your nameservers and let NS records point to AWS IPs/domains and then create A record point at your Droplet IP.

If you'd like to use DO nameservers, you can change your NS records to:
ns1.digitalocean.com
ns2.digitalocean.com
ns3.digitalocean.com

and create domain record (equivalent to A record) in DO control panel under "DNS" menu option on left after you log in.

EDIT: Here's some more on this topic - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-host-name-with-digitalocean

jesin August 8, 2014

When you set nameservers for a subdomain it is being delegated (aka handed over) to them. So making A record changes in AWS will not make any difference.

Assuming your domain is example.com and subdomain is do1.example.com you have two options here:

Option 1:

In your AWS console create the following A record

Name: do1.example.com
Type: A - IPv4 Address
Value: IP.address.of.droplet

Option 2:

Create 3 NS records in AWS:

Name: do1.example.com
Type: NS - Name Server
Value:
ns1.digitalocean.com
ns2.digitalocean.com
ns3.digitalocean.com

Login to your DigitalOcean account, open the DNS section, click Add Domain and fill in the details:

Name: do1.example.com
IP Address: IP.address.of.droplet

morgane6bf4b90b September 19, 2016

@jesin I'm in the same boat as the original poster and had went with option 1 thinking this would be easy. The A record works, I got to blog.sitename.com and the wordpress-droplet loads, but in my url bar the dns entry changes to the actual IP address. I've since edited my apache2/sites-enabled and ensured I had the site ServerName in place. I've also created domain records on the GUI... Thoughts?

morgane6bf4b90b September 19, 2016

Helpful hint for others, in the end my issue came down to the wordpress install having a default IP address set inside of the settings. Once adjusted it worked.

knelly26 February 1, 2018

Just came across this and followed Option A - I know this is an old post, but wanted to add that it took about 5 minutes for AWS to "catch up" and redirect traffic. I believe this was due to my "Time To Live" parameter of 300 seconds which was set in Route 53 for the rule I used. Basically, the old (AWS) IP address was cached and after the 300 seconds had passed, my new (DO) IP address was added.

jadew2 June 13, 2018

For me, my problem was I was setting the name servers in the hosted zone, and not under the registered domain tab.

I used this guide to find the right place to set the name servers:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/domain-name-servers-glue-records.html

After this I was able to use Digital Ocean DNS.

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