Client wants to keep domain on another service (for email, mostly), but use Netlify to host website

Support
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This will help,

Basically,

  • A CNAME record for www.rmws.com pointing to rmws.netlify.app
  • An ALIAS, flattened CNAME, or ANAME record for rmws.com pointing to apex-loadbalancer.netlify.com. Cloudflare should support this out of the box.
    • If they are having issues with ALIAS record, they can set an A record for rmws.com to 75.2.60.5. But if this is the case, I would recommend setting the main site to www.rmws.com instead of rmws.com.

Also, for your CMS:

  • A CNAME record for admin.rmws.com pointing to adminrmws.netlify.app.

Just a note, it will be best if all of these are not proxied through Cloudflare, meaning that the cloud icon is not orange. See: [Support Guide] What problems could occur when using Cloudflare in front of Netlify?

Also, if you happen to be on a High-Performance Edge enterprise plan, you will have a custom subdomain to point to.

Assuming that both the old site remain active and the Netlify site is already configured for custom domains, there shouldn’t be any downtime. But as always, DNS propagation may cause website downtime until everything is fully propagated.