For other people running into issues deleting Netlify DNS records marked as a “system record” (i.e., the NETLIFY and NETLIFYv6 type DNS records in our Managed DNS service), please let us know and support will be happy to do this.
EDIT (2021): This can now be self-served from within the DNS pane, in our UI.
We’ve lost a whole day on this issue and have yet to receive a reply from support. It’s very frustrating when traditional solutions (managing our own CICD) end up being faster because our move to Netlify is blocking simple things like changing our DNS settings.
Glad to see that Luke got your issue fixed and informed you in the helpdesk that he had done so less than 9 hours after you first contacted us on the topic. That’s rather faster than we are usually able to help free customers, so you’re welcome :). You should consider upgrading to a paid account if fast support turnaround is important to you. We are happy to provide our service and tech support for free, but we cannot promise fast responses for free customers.
On to the issue at hand:
We know our automated DNS records aren’t always perfect - we try to be “automagic” and it’s one-size-fits-most. Let’s break down how those are created for your and others’ future reference.
NETLIFY records are actually linked A records from our DNS provider, NS1 (cf their documentation), and we create those ONLY in DNS Zones we manage, and ONLY when you apply a hostname to a site. Don’t want a NETLIFY record for a hostname? Do not apply it to a Netlify site.
In cases where there is an undesired NETLIFY or NETLIFYv6 record, you will need our help to remove them at present, though we have an open feature request to allow self-deletion so perhaps that will change. In most cases, deleting those records would bring down your website, so that’s why we have it locked off right now. We also set them to non-obvious values to enable our CDN and moreover make sure you are on the correct CDN for your account level (The Enterprise CDN has slightly different DNS records).
When do we automatically create a record?
you apply the name as a custom domain or domain alias to a site AFTER activating our DNS hosting. We do not retroactively create these records for you if you enable our DNS hosting after configuring a site with one or more hostnames.
you activate a branch subdomain by selecting a branch from the settings card in our domain settings for a site.
Of course these records only matter in case your DNS Zone is both configured at Netlify to be managed by us AND configured at your registrar to point to us.
Just ran into this issue as well. Says I can’t open an issue because I don’t have a paid plan, but I’m on a team that has a paid plan… Any idea how I can contact someone to help?
Hi, @feld, the email address associated with this community login doesn’t show a paid team at Netlify. Do you use a different email address to login to the Netlify UI?
Also, what is the DNS record which you are trying to delete? (If you would rather DM/PM this information, please let us know when you reply and we’ll get that enabled.)
Regarding being able to create a helpdesk ticket, when doing so please be sure to exactly match the email address you find for your user here:
If you are a member of a paid team at Netlify, this will allow you to create the ticket. If there are other questions about this, please let us know.
Currently Netlify redirects my www.hivedmined.net to hivemined.net. I want to keep hivemined.net on Netlify, but would like www.hivemined.net to point elsewhere. When I tried to update this in the DNS control panel, it says, “This is a system record that cannot be managed directly.”
Please advise. I am not on the paid plan so I can not contact support.
Hi, @saqib-ali, and welcome to our Netlify community site. The system record for www.hivemined.net has been removed and the custom CNAME record is working now:
Super responsive support!