I'm using Google Compute Engine and want to point a custom url to the appspot domain. I don't need a whole hosting service, so I was wondering if there was a company that would allow me to purchase/transfer/register a domain, and host it simply pointing it to the appspot domain. I know I can do this through godaddy and cloudflare, but I don't want to pay for a bunch of stuff I'm not using. Is there any company that could just purchase and point the domain for me for really cheap?
It's not clear to me if you're using App Engine (appspot.com) or Compute Engine. (no DNS by default, just raw IP addresses)
In any case, you'll need to register the domain with a domain registrar like GoDaddy. It looks like Google's option, Google Domains, is currently an invite-only beta.
Once you've registered your domain name, the process is a little different depending on whether you meant App Engine or Compute Engine.
For App Engine, you'll want to set up DNS A records for the domain itself (aka "named domain" forwarding). This can be done in the Google Developer Console.
For Compute Engine, you'll probably want to set the A record for the named domain to point to a static IP address you have reserved in your GCE project. You can assign a static address to either a single instance (for small websites) or to a load balancer. If I were setting this up for a company, I would probably try to use the HTTP load balancing feature that's in limited preview, as it can perform latency-optimized cross-region load balancing.
Related
I am a bit new to the deployment of a website. I have a server which is written in Node.js. Previously I had been using Heroku for deploying my apps without knowing much about deployment. I would like to know how do I deploy my server to create a website which has .com at the end of it like www.example.com and not www.example.herokuapp.com. I think it has something to do with domains (correct me if I am wrong). I would like to know what exactly is a domain and a DNS provider and how to deploy a website in such a way. Thank you.
You should ask one question to yourself when you hit www.example.com in browser how does it load a page?. When you run a website on your laptop it basically runs locally, if you want to access your website over the internet you would require public IP(host or server) accessible over the internet so you can access a webpage using public IP:port. But this is not the best option because IP may change in the future and also remembering IP for each application will be difficult. Imagine if you access Facebook, Instagram or any other websites by its IP addresses how difficult and inconvenient would it be? There are a couple of things you should know.
DNS-> Domain Name system
Every host is identified by the IP address but remembering numbers is
very difficult for the people and also the IP addresses are not static
therefore, a mapping is required to change the domain name to IP
address. So DNS is used to convert the domain name of the websites to
their numerical IP address.
DNS is a hostname to IP address translation service. DNS is a distributed database implemented in a hierarchy of name servers. It is an application layer protocol for message exchange between clients and servers.
Name servers
Domain Name Servers (DNS) are the Internet's equivalent of a phone book. They maintain a directory of domain names and translate them to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. This is necessary because, although domain names are easy for people to remember, computers or machines, access websites based on IP addresses.
DNS record
A domain name, IP address what is the validity?? what is the time to live ?? and all the information related to that domain name.
Once you understand the DNS
Host(Deploy) your website to Amazon EC2 or Heroku and obtain Public IP.
Buy a domain from domain provider like Godaddy
Map domain(ie www.example.com to IP)-> DNS record
Mapping domain to IP may vary platform to platform but the Core principle remains the same. I would suggest you these below link. Try to find differences in both, doing so you will learn along the way
http://www.littlebigextra.com/map-domain-name-amazon-aws-ec2-instance/
https://medium.com/progress-on-ios-development/connecting-an-ec2-instance-with-a-godaddy-domain-e74ff190c233
I'm need to point an Azure hosted root domain/naked domain (example.com) to an AWS Elastic Load Balancer. Classic ELB's don't have IP's while A records can only point to IP's. Azure doesn't support the non-standard ALIAS/ANAME records that allow a CNAME-like configuration for A records.
Azure DNS provides a way to point to Azure cloud hosted websites using a combination of pointing the A record to the website's IP and creating a TXT record containing the DNS name of the website.
AWS Route 53 provides the ALIAS record type for connecting root domains to Load Balancers.
Is there a way to do this without resorting to using an extra server instance with a static (elastic) IP address just to do 301 redirects to www.example.com?
EDIT:I should add that since asking this question I found out that AWS network load balancers support both static and elastic IPs but we are on OpsWorks Chef 11 stacks which only supports classic load balancers.
Azure doesn't support the non-standard ALIAS/ANAME records
Note that these are not non-standard records, because they aren't record types at all. They are configuration entries that allow the nameservers to generate and return a standard A or AAAA record (or other standard types, in Route 53) based on information obtained dynamically by the nameserver, rather than based on static configuration.
But, there isn't another good solution to this. That's why these options exist.
A workaround is to use a service like http://wwwizer.com.
But your easiest and most straightforward solution is to host the domain on Route 53. This doesn't require changing your registrar -- you only have to change the authoritative nameservers. If you have subdomains that need their DNS hosted elsewhere for operational reasons, you can always delegate them. But this is a limitation of the fundamental design of DNS.
Simply put:
I have a domain called erik.com, two azure websites (east and west), and one traffic manager that is setup to manage the two azure websites.
When I take east offline (by throwing a non-2** status code) erik.com goes offline. This should not be the case! Right?
However, when I add a sub domain to the two azure websites (www.erik.com) then it works! I take one or the other offline and the traffic manager resolves to the available website.
I'm hearing/reading things that tell me that Traffic manager doesn't work with root domains like that... Say what?! Why?
As explained in the FAQs at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/traffic-manager-how-traffic-manager-works/#faq , Traffic Manager does not support 'naked' / apex domain names.
*Can I use Traffic Manager with a ‘naked’ (www-less) domain name?
Not currently.
The DNS CNAME record type is used to create a mapping from one DNS name to another name. As explained in the Traffic Manager example, Traffic Manager requires a DNS CNAME record to map the vanity DNS name (e.g. www.contoso.com) to the Traffic Manager profile DNS name (e.g. contoso.trafficmanager.net). In addition the Traffic Manager profile itself returns a second DNS CNAME to indicate which endpoint the client should connect to.
The DNS standards do not permit CNAMEs to co-exist with other DNS records of the same type. Since the apex (or root) of a DNS zone always contains two pre-existing DNS records (the SOA and the authoritative NS records), this means a CNAME record cannot be created at the zone apex without violating the DNS standards.
To work around this issue, we recommend that services using a naked (www-less) domain that want to use Traffic Manager should use an HTTP re-direct to direct traffic from the naked domain to a different URL, which can then use Traffic Manager. For example, the naked domain ‘contoso.com’ can re-direct users to ‘www.contoso.com’ which can then use Traffic Manager.
Full support for naked domains in Traffic Manager is tracked in our feature backlog. If you are interested in this feature please register your support by voting for it on our community feedback site.*
I'm new at DNS world, did some readings in the Internet and wanted to know if I came to the right conclusions. I want to build a system where users are able to create new sub-domains of existing registered domains automatically:
My system provides services to different companies, these services are hosted in my system or some cloud provider. Lets call my system "services" and some company "company1". I want to offer "company1" my services and have its users access these services through "company1" new sub-domain, when "company1" has an already registered domain company1.com. I want "company1" admin user be able to control and choose the sub-domain via my system when he registers his company in my system, and have the whole thing automatic. If i understand correctly:
if the admin would want to use a sub-domain like services.company1.com this will be a problem since I would need to update the authoritative name-servers of company1.com which I don't know who they are, and even if I have a way to know them (and from reading a bit I see that I do have a way), I don't know if every such name server will allow such updates from some external source, connectivity issues etc
if the admin would like to use a sub-domain like company1.services.com then I can achieve this by having my own dns server which I will register the services.com domain for and actually manage all these company sub-domains in my own dns server. This means though that all companies will have to have a sub-domain under my domain services.com
Please correct me if I have a wrong view on how DNS works.
thanks!
services.company1.com
To provide this kind of domain name to your customer, you will need their collaboration. A lot of companies provides this kind of feature by asking you to point an alias (CNAME Record) to a specific server.
Examples of concrete usage
blog.company1.com. 3600 IN CNAME domains.tumblr.com.
shop.company1.com. 3600 IN CNAME myapp.herokuapp.com.
git.company1.com. 3600 IN CNAME bitbucket.org.
Here's some links to the documentation of companies offering this feature:
BitBucket
Heroku
Tumblr
Sample client zone file
So in your case your customer DNS zone will contain something like that:
services.company1.com. 3600 IN CNAME domains.services.com.
where domains.services.com. will be the server that handles the subdomain authentication
company1.services.com
To provide to your customers company1.services.com, you don't have to manage your own DNS server, you just have to be able to add a wildcard record to point all the subdomains to your application. It will be the role of your application to filter your service per subdomains.
Sample service zone file
For example (where 0.0.0.0 is your service IP address):
*.services.com. 3600 IN A 0.0.0.0
From the looks of it the new Azure Websites Feature still does not support hosting them under a naked domain such as example.com instead of www.example.com. Am I missing something?
Azure Websites have now released support for naked domains. Websites that are run on Shared or Reserved instances does support naked domains through an A record. Domain management is available through the Azure management portal.
Update 2012-10-21:
I previously stated that free instances could rely on CNAME to redirect a subdomain to their free Azure-website, but this appear to be incorrect, at least at the moment. Doing a CNAME to your Azure-website will result in an HTTP 404, as reported by MemeDeveloper in his comment.
However, if you run your website on a Free instance, you are still limited to CNAME, so for those websites naked domains are not possible.
Update:
As MemeDeveloper suggest in his comment, there are web services you can use that will take your naked-domain example.com and redirect it to www.example.com for you. For your www subdomain you could then have a CNAME to your Azure-URL.
Not as clean as a simple A record that is available for your paid websites, but a workaround for your free sites.
The conversations above are a bit dated. This entry however, comes up at the top of the list when folks are hunting/searching for Azure Naked Domain support.I'd update the answer.
Azure now supplies an IP in shared and > plans, and you can configure a naked domain.
Check out the following articles for more info:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-custom-domain-name/
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/waws/archive/2014/10/01/mapping-a-naked-url-to-your-azure-web-site-url-with-no-www.aspx
Azure does not support naked domain, because this requires to map definitively an IP address to the domain name. To map a naked domain name, you need a 1 record in the DNS. So, in this case, services like load balancing are more difficult to put in place.
Most registrars provide a way to redirect a naked domain request to another name, through HTTP redirect mechanism. For instance, you could redirect example.com to www.example.com.
There seems to be some confusion about this. I don't know what the deal with Websites is, but normal Azure Web Roles provide a virtual IP address that is guaranteed not to change unless you delete a webrole deployment.
You can bind a domain name A-record to that VIP, as described here.
In practice, that means that when I want to update my website, I have to do a staging deployment first; and then switch it with the production deployment, and finally delete the staging deployment. The only caveat that I've been aware of, is that you can't do this if you switch your endpoint configuration (not even names).
I'm currently looking if there are same kinds of guarantees for websites, but haven't found appropriate documentation yet.