Connect Your Domain and Server with DNS Records

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The Gist

Now that we have a domain and a server, we can connect the two using DNS records. + DNS (domain name system) records are usually put into your registrar and direct people looking up your website to the server where your website and other things will be. +

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+ Get your IPv4/IPv6 addresses from Vultr and put them into A/AAAA records on Epik. + Simple process, takes a minute, but here's a guide with a million images just so you know. +

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Open up your Registrar

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+ As before, we will be using Epik as a registrar and Vultr as a server host. + Go ahead and log into your accounts on both. + Open up Epik, or your registrar, and click on your domain and then a choice for "DNS records." + This is the screen you'll want to see on Epik. +

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+ Note that we are on the "External Hosts (A, AAAA)" tab by default. + Epik sometimes adds records to this page once you buy a domain. + If they did, you can go ahead and delete them so they look clean like the picture above. +

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+ All we have to do now is get our IP addresses from Vultr and add new DNS records that will send connections to our server. +

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+ Keep the Epik tab open and open Vultr and we will copy-and-paste our IP addresses in. +

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Find your server's IP addresses

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+ Looking at your server in the Vultr menu, you should see a number next to it. + Mine here is 104.238.126.105 as you can see below the server name (which I have named landchad.net after the domain I will soon attach to it). + That is my IPv4 address. +

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+ Copy your IPv4 address and + on Epik, click the "Add Record" record button and add two A entries pasting in your IPv4 address like I've done for mine here. +

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+ I add two entries. + One has nothing written in the "Host" section. This will direct connections to landchad.net over IPv4 to our IP address. + The second has a * in the "Host" section. + This will direct connections to all possible subdomains to the right place too, + I mean mail.landchad.net or blog.landchad.net and any other subdomain we might want to add later. +

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+ Now let's get our IPv6 address, which is a little more hidden for some reason. + IPv6 are important because we are running our of IPv4 addresses so it is highly important to allow connections via IPv6 as it will be standard in the future. + Anyway, now back on Vultr, click on the server name. +

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On the server settings, click on settings + and we will see we are on a submenu labeled "IPv4" where we see our IPv4 address again. +

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+ Now just click on IPv6 submenu to reveal your IPv6 address. +

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+ That ugly looking sequence of numbers and letters with colons in between (2001:19f0:5:ccc:5400:03ff:fe58:324a) is my IPv6 address. + Yours will look something like it. + Now let's put it into Epik, this time, be sure to select to put in AAAA records as below: +

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+ Now just click "Save Changes." + It might take a minute for the DNS settings to propgate across the internet. +

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Test it out!

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+ Now we should have our domain name directing to our new server. + We can check by pinging our domain name, check this out: +

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+ As you can see, our ping to landchad.net is now being directed to 104.238.126.105. + That means we have successfully set up our DNS records! + You can also run the command host if you have it, which will list both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for a domain name. +

+ + Next: Setting up the Webserver +