TLS certificate renewal failing with NXDOMAIN — wildcard cert requested despite external DNS (VentraIP)

Support
1

Site name: willowy-heliotrope-ca5802
Custom domain: fitoutpeople.com.au (and www.fitoutpeople.com.au)

My TLS certificate renewal keeps failing with this error:

SniCertificate::CertificateValidationError: Unable to verify challenge for *.fitoutpeople.com.au: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up TXT for _acme-challenge.fitoutpeople.com.au - check that a DNS record exists for this domain

DNS for this domain is managed externally at VentraIP (not Netlify DNS), so the automatic DNS-01 challenge for a wildcard cert can’t succeed — there’s no _acme-challenge TXT record because Netlify can’t write one into an external zone.

I don’t need a wildcard certificate — just standard coverage for the apex domain and www. Could you please remove the wildcard requirement and reissue a standard (non-wildcard) certificate for fitoutpeople.com.au + www.fitoutpeople.com.au?

I also just hit a rate limit message (“too many certificate creation with this site recently”) after retrying via the dashboard, so I’ve stopped clicking Renew and am posting here instead.

Certificate expires Aug 19, 2026.

Thanks for your help!

2

Resolved this myself. Deleted the stray Netlify DNS zone that existed for the domain (even though DNS was never actually delegated there), then removed/re-added the custom domain, which caused it to correctly request a standard cert instead of a wildcard one. Renewed successfully now.

3

Glad you got it sorted! Deleting the stray Netlify DNS zone and re-adding the custom domain is a really useful fix to know. Thanks for sharing the solution!