Setup cPanel to handle DNS locally, instead of Digital Ocean do it

Question

Hello. I am trying to setup cPanel to handle multidomains, including my primary domain (eg. mydomain.com), but seems that I need tell to Digital Ocean / domains page all domains and subdomains that I need access. It is annoying and I too have an additional issue on primary domain.

What I need is that cPanel handle all DNS locally, instead of put this responsability to Digital Ocean / domains. So if I call www.mydomain.com, it should check on cPanel if www is registered to mydomain.com, and not on Digital Ocean / domains.

What happen: I have a mydomain.com registered on Digital Ocean / domains, with this following settings:

A @ {floatting IP} NS ns1.digitalocean.com NS ns2.digitalocean.com NS ns3.digitalocean.com

It allow me to access my cPanel on mydomain.com:2087 correctly, and I can login normally too. Inside cPanel, I setup my hostname as server.mydomain.com, then I could create an account to mydomain.com to setup it contents.

But, when I access mydomain.com, it send me to cPanel 404 not found error.

Ryan Quinn · Answer

In general with cPanel it’s recommended not to use external DNS servers. What you’ll usually want to do is:

1.) Decide whether to run a secondary DNS server. This is usually a good idea for redundancy but if your sites are all hosted on just the one server that is running your DNS it’s less of a problem. If you do want to use a secondary DNS server you can likely use a smaller droplet for it and cPanel/WHM offers a free DNS only license for this purpose so there is no need for a second full cPanel license.

2.) Register your nameservers. With your domain registrar you can register your own nameservers (ns1.yourdomain.com, etc). This is in a seperate place from managing normal DNS records or pointing your domain to someone else’s nameservers, if you have trouble finding it, ask your registrar. You can then create nameservers pointing to your droplet(s).

3.) Point your domain to your newly create nameservers.

Now, cPanel will be able to manage all your DNS settings internally. One great thing about using a paid control panel like cPanel is that they provide really good support and can assist you with the cPanel side of this setup. This is the standard, recommended way to use cPanel with DNS so once it’s set up you should be all set.

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Setup cPanel to handle DNS locally, instead of Digital Ocean do it

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