I think I finally figured this out. I am pretty sure it was simply that I didn’t set the wordpress URL and site URL (in wordpress settings) to have ’www.’ in front of the domain name.

I also switched to use google nameservers afterwards so I could use their email service.

For anyone future looking at this, including my future self, here is how I set up.

• Domain registered through google domains
• Using google’s nameservers, which is default. This allows you to use their email service if desired.
• No domain needs to be setup with digital ocean.
• Under Custom resource records in google domains, set @ A 1h ip.address.of.droplet and www CNAME 1h domain.name.
• Not sure if it’s required, but I edited the apache2 config file on the digital ocean server. This file for me was “/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf”. I added two lines: ServerName domain.name and ServerAlias www.domain.name.

I had a similar problem but caused by following advice by ServerPilot.
Tip: Enter your server’s IP address as the app’s domain in order to preview the app in your browser using your server’s IP address.

This stopped me being able to access my website by the domain name because the wordpress install set its urls to the IP not the domain. So even after my dns propagated properly I got errors when entering the domain. Changing the url settings in wp-config got me access via the domain but I was unable to install multisite getting “Too many redirects” errors even with correct wpconfig and htaccess configuration. Starting from scratch with a new app and NOT following your tip worked fine. Good advice but it should say instead

Tip:Enter your server’s domain here, after app creation add the IP address as another of the app’s domain in order to preview the app in your browser using your server’s IP address.