Pointing domains to Flywheel from GoDaddy

Updated on May 1st, 2020

Note

This article is for customers who have purchased domains that are managed by GoDaddy. We have a general help tutorial as well as instructions for other domain providers here.

Flywheel provides each site with an IP address which can be used to point a domain to. This is useful if you own, say, example.com, and would like it to resolve to a Flywheel site.

Add the domain to your Flywheel site and note the IP address

Under the Domains panel in the Flywheel site overview, add the domain you’d like to point to Flywheel. Set the domain to primary. Our system will automatically perform a series searches for the old domain, replacing them with the new domain. All non-primary domains will also be set up with a 301 redirect to the primary domain.

GoDaddy DNS - Add A Domain Flywheel

Note

Take note of the IP address that Flywheel provides you. In this example, it is 104.131.65.103. Your IP address will be a different set of numbers.

Access GoDaddy's DNS control panel

Once logged into GoDaddy’s administration panel, use the “Domains” menu drop down to navigate to your domains.

Find the domain you wish to point to Flywheel.

Click the DNS button.

GoDaddy DNS - DNS Highlight

Warning

There’s a good chance you’ll see several records in here, especially if your domain has been pointed at a different service. For now, we’re just going to be concerned with the A Name record described below since it’s the record responsible for pointing your domain to your website. Be careful about modifying or deleting any other records – especially MX records, which are responsible for email. Also, it never hurts to take a screenshot before you start making changes.

Note

GoDaddy uses placeholder symbols to represent parts of their DNS manager system. Here is a quick cheat-sheet of these symbols and what they mean:

@

This represents the root version of your domain. In our example above, @ would be a placeholder for example.com without any subdomain or www before it.

*

This is a wildcard record. It means that it doesn’t matter what subdomain you type into your browser(www.example.com, shop.example.com, dolphins.example.com). All are going to be directed by this * value.

The default setup on GoDaddy is to set up @ (the root version of your domain), as an individual A record that all need to be edited to point to your website.

Additionally, for subdomains, GoDaddy does not require you to type in the entire domain for every field. Simply typing in blog in the Name field will mean you are creating a subdomain that is actually blog.example.com.

Replace the A Name DNS record associated with the domain

First, select the A Name record that currently exists. Click on the Edit icon (looks like a pencil) to edit the record.

Then edit this A Name record with the @ symbol as Host and your Flywheel IP address in the Points to field.

GoDaddy DNS - A Record Edit

Click Save when finished.

Unless you have a subdomain setup like shop.yourdomain.com, you should likely only need one A Record value. At the very least, make sure that you only have one A record with @ set as the host and that this host is pointing to your Flywheel IP address.

Note

We recommend you also set a CNAME record in your zone file to allow use of the www prefix. GoDaddy should do this automatically, but if your zone file does not look like the one below, add a CNAME record for www so it matches.

Verify that the record is in place and save changes

Check to make sure the record change has been updated and points to your site’s Flywheel IP address. These values are saved on a record by record basis, so you’re likely done at this stage. Good job!

Warning

DNS by nature can take 24-48 hours to fully propagate across the entire internet, though we generally see much quicker propagation. GoDaddy has each Time to Live setting for each record set to 1 hour. Depending on when that last hourly check was, you should see your changes go live in an hour or less. If you’d like to speed things up, you can select a shorter TTL value, but make sure to do that at least an hour or more BEFORE you edit the rest of your records.

Your domain should now be pointing to your Flywheel site.
If you get stuck, or your changes aren’t working, we’d love to help! Message us with a screenshot of your current DNS records or provide us with your current registrar login for assistance.

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