Question

Unable to configure DNS properly

I bought a domain on go daddy, edited the dns records to ns1, ns2 and ns3.digitalocean.com, added a domain to my droplet, added an A record with the parameters ‘@’ and the ip address of my droplet, saved everything. I still can’t get the domain to resolve, I installed apache on the droplet and I can access it if I enter the IP address of the droplet. What am I doing wrong here ?

Show comments

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!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

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.

Ryan Quinn
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
February 8, 2018
Accepted Answer

There are two common reasons why issues are encountered at this stage of DNS configuration. As @gc948486cbc56b8 said, it sounds like you’ve done everything right.

  • If you created your domain in our DNS system with a subdomain like www.domain.com rather than as domain.com A records under it will be creating second level subdomains like sub.www.domain.com rather than regular ones like sub.domain.com

  • When you first register a domain it may take up to 24-48 hours for it to propagate depending on the registrar. When pointing the domain to a new set of nameservers there can be a similar propagation time at first before the domain begins working from everywhere.

You can use the nslookup tool to check that your records are returned correctly from the authoritative server. nslookup offers an interactive mode where you can specify the nameservers to look up an address on so you can see that they are returning the right data.

ryan@workstation:~$ nslookup
> server ns1.digitalocean.com
Default server: ns1.digitalocean.com
Address: 173.245.58.51#53
> digitalocean.com
Server:		ns1.digitalocean.com
Address:	173.245.58.51#53

Name:	digitalocean.com
Address: 198.211.111.227
Name:	digitalocean.com
Address: 198.211.111.226

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel