I’ve been using Google Domains and Google’s name servers for a while now. I’m in the process of migrating my site to Netlify. If possible I would like to continue using Google Domains’ name servers for their subdomain forwarding and email features. How can I set up my site on Netlify so that mydomain.com will point to mysite.netlify.com?
I’m still pretty new to setting up DNS and related settings. I tried adding a CNAME and A record to Google Domains, but it didn’t have any effect; it could be that I didn’t do it right. I’m just not sure what I should be looking for. If you need more information from me, let me know and I’ll happily provide it.
People do post in here about google domains - if I were you, I’d work through some of the articles that appear in this search and see if they are helpful at all:
@perry Hey, sorry it’s been a while! So I’ve brushed up on my basic understanding of DNS and looked through some of the existing community topics on Google Domains, and I think I know what I need to do. I just wanted to make sure my understanding is correct.
I have the domain awwfeathers.com through Google Domains. Currently I’m just forwarding it to awwfeathers.netlify.com. However, I want to set it up so that awwfeathers.com is the actual URL for my site. I think the best thing to do may be to use Netlify’s name servers instead of Google Domains, but I want all of my subdomain and email forwarding I set up to still work. It looks like it should be fairly straightforward to copy over everything that’s currently under the “Synthetic records” section on Google Domains. However, there are a couple things I’m not clear on.
Subdomain forwarding
I use subdomains quite a bit to make it easier for readers to find different things. For example, news.awwfeathers.com takes them to my newsletter signup page, store.awwfeathers.com takes them to my online store, etc. These just forward them to third party sites. When I examine the record, I see something like this:
When adding the above as a new record on Netlify, I assume that the Type should be CNAME, Name should be news, and TTL should be 3600. But what should go in the Value field? In the Google Domains record, it has ghs.googlehosted.com in the Data field, but then it has this for every subdomain forwarding record I have. Would I put the url it’s supposed to forward the user to (which in this case would be https://mailchi.mp/a5d0b3956e86/jaylarkstudios)?
Thanks for the help!
Edit: After some testing, I found out I can’t put the URL I want to forward people to in the Value field. I can put ghs.googlehosted.com as in the Data field of the Google Domains record, but I’m not sure how to tell it to forward people to the correct URL.
I’m certain there’s great way of doing this through DNS, but a quick-and-dirty way of doing it would be to set up
Your explanation of what you are doing seems confusing. You say you are using sub-domains, but you seem actually to be using links that look like sub-domains to point to external assets, such as your newsletter and store sites, which you do not host yourself.
Therefore, what the links look like to the visit are of much less importance than the actual link code. If you must have the link appear to be news.awwfeathers.com, go ahead, but just have the href for that link point to mailchi.mp/a5d0b3956e86/jaylarkstudios.
There’s no sense trying to make something so simple more complicated.
@gregraven The purpose of setting up subdomain forwarding (or one of them at least) is to create a simple, easy to remember URL for people to use. news.awwfeathers.com is much easier to remember than mailchi.mp/a5d0b3956e86/jaylarkstudios. In addition, say I change my newsletter service sometime in the future, so the signup page is no longer at mailchi.mp/a5d0b3956e86/jaylarkstudios but some completely different URL. Thanks to subdomain forwarding, all I have to do is change the URL that news.awwfeathers.com points to, and every link out there will continue to work by taking users to the new page.
Google Domains provides subdomain forwarding for a reason. I’m just wondering if it’s possible to achieve the same effect by adding a record on Netlify, and if so how to set it up.
@balloon As mentioned above, awwfeathers.com is currently forwarding to awwfeathers.netlify.com, but I want the former to be the actual URL for my site. You can tell this isn’t currently the case because when you enter awwfeathers.com into the browser address bar, once you get to the page, it no longer says awwfeathers.com. It now says awwfeathers.netlify.com. I want awwfeathers.com to be the actual domain.
I already know I can accomplish this by using Netlify as my name server instead of Google Domains. What I’m trying to figure out is how to set it up so my subdomain forwarding will continue to function as it currently does.
use hostname-based redirects from that site to connect transparently to those other services without changing addresses in the URL Bar: Redirect options | Netlify Docs
So - the only DNS config is CNAME’s for any name(s) to your netlify sites and adding the hostname in our UI on those sites. Then in _redirects, you could use something like this:
…which would have your visitors connect to netlify, which then connects to mailchimp for you, and we’ll proxy responses from mailchimp back to the browser - without a browser-facing redirect!
Thank you for the help @fool !
It actually doesn’t matter to me if the URL in the browser’s address bar changes when the user is redirected after visiting one of my subdomains (news, store, etc.). I only wanted the URL to stay the same when visiting my main site’s URL (awwfeathers.com), which I believe will be the case once I start using Netlify’s name servers. (Sorry for any confusion; there’ve been a couple different conversations going on in this thread!)
As long as the user is forwarded to the appropriate URL when entering one of my subdomains into the address bar, I’m happy. Does that simplify things at all? Or should I still move forward with the solution you suggested above?
I think I’ve got it for now. I’ve got my subdomains pointing to my main site and I’ll work on putting together a toml configuration file for my site that includes domain level redirects. If I have trouble with that and can’t find a solution I’ll post a separate topic. Thanks again for the help!
