Last reviewed by Netlify Support in November 2024
The following guide outlines how to mitigate the impact of a Netlify load balancer experiencing service degradation.
If supported at your provider, use an ALIAS, ANAME, or Flattened CNAME record for your Apex domain
This is described in more detail in our documentation but can be summarized as:
- For your apex domain (only!)
- If your DNS provider supports ALIAS, ANAME, or Flattened CNAME records
- you should point that record to Netlify’s load balancer at:
apex-loadbalancer.netlify.com.
This works at every provider (whose service supports such records on apex domains), which is unlike a record targeting your sitename.netlify.app. More details about that in this article.
If you use an A record, make sure you are configured to use the latest load balancer IP
Since March 2021, the correct load balancer IP for Standard Edge Network is 75.2.60.5. Previous load balancer IP addresses will eventually be deprecated. For High Performance Edge Network, please refer to your Onboarding Guide or contact Support.
Make sure you only use the load balancer IP for the apex domain
An apex record is the DNS record for the bare domain you own, e.g. my-domain.co.uk or my-site.com - where mydomain is your domain and .co.uk is the top-level-domain.
For any records that are not apex records (such as www.my-domain.co.uk) you should not be using an A record. Instead, you should use a CNAME record. See our docs for more details.
Make sure your bare domain is not the primary domain of the site
If you add a domain without a subdomain to your site, Netlify will automatically handle the www subdomain for it and redirect to a single primary domain. Use the domain settings on your site to ensure that the www. variant is your primary domain so it will be used for serving the actual content.
When the www. variant is configured with a CNAME record and configured to be the primary domain for your site, the load balancer will not be relied upon.
Switch to Netlify DNS
If you’re using Netlify DNS for your domain, your site will never use the load balancer for the apex. Consider using Netlify DNS for our most reliable configuration! See the docs for more details.
Hand out the non-apex domain to your customers
If you are not able to switch the DNS record on your apex you can give your customers the www. variant of your domain manually to make sure they will get a DNS record that doesn’t point to the load balancer.