I have a domain, which has a couple of subdomains, hosted at dreamhost.
I want to keep the subdomains as they are, but want to point my main domain to netlify.
I’m not sure how to do this. I talked to the dreamhost support first and they told me “You’ll
need to add subdomain A records over at the new hosting the domain points to.”
I tried to add the subdomains at netlify but apparently is not possible, or I was trying in the incorrect place.
Can someone provide some light here please? thanks!
Hi, @kilinkis, and welcome to the Netlify community site.
First, I see a single domain added to Netlify DNS here for you account. You can see this domain here (only when you are logged in as you of course - no one else will see it there):
Is the domain there the one you are trying to configure? If so, this domain is not using Netlify DNS and this DNS zone at Netlify should be deleted unless you do decide to change to our DNS service.
So, unless you actually change the name servers to the ones at Netlify, please delete the configuration for Netlify DNS for this domain. Things won’t work correctly with the zone created but not working. It must be deleted or activated for things to work correctly.
You can use two methods to connect domains to Netlify sites:
So I follow that guide you sent me. My hosting provider doesn’t have CNAME like records, so I added an A record and pointed it to 104.198.14.52.
Then went ahead and deleted the DNS zone for the domain, as you said.
that seemed to work, but on the browser now I see: www.kilinkis.me ’s server IP address could not be found.
there is one thing that confuses me here:
the guide you sent says In the Custom domains panel, select Check DNS configuration
well, all that there is now gone after deleting the DNS zone. So I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do there. I think there is something missing, if not, how does netlify connect 104.198.14.52 to kilinkis.me?
Hi, @kilinkis, when you add a domain to Netlify both the www subdomain and the apex/root domain are both linked to the site.
(This only happens for the apex/root and www subdomain domain names. If you add example.kilinkis.me for example, only that one domain would be added.)
So, the error is happening because the www subdomain (meaning www.kilinkis.me) doesn’t have a DNS record for it.
It is very common for DNS services to not support CNAMEs for apex/root domains. Using the IP address 104.198.14.52 for the apex/root domain (kilinkis.me) is correct.
For the www subdomain, your DNS will almost certainly support a CNAME record. Using the CNAME is important because this is what allows your site to be hosted on CDN nodes spread geographically around the world so that visitors visit a node closest to them.
This is the record which already exists:
kilinkis.me. 14400 IN A 104.198.14.52
This is the record still needed:
www.kilinkis.me. 1800 IN CNAME kilinkisme.netlify.com.
Please add the CNAME record for the www subdomain pointing to kilinkisme.netlify.com. You can confirm if that record is working (or not) using the DNS lookup below:
Once it is working, you will be able to add an automatic SSL certificate with the “Verify DNS configuration” and/or “Renew certificate” buttons found here.
If there are other questions, we are happy to assist.
thanks for your reply.