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5 steps to connect your GoDaddy domain to Google Cloud VMs

If  you want to connect you GoDaddy domain to Google cloud VM Instances then you are in right place. In this tutorial you will learn 5 steps which will help you to connect your GoDaddy domain to Google cloud server.

How to Connect your GoDaddy domain to Google Cloud VM Instances?

By adding a ‘A’ record from your GoDaddy’s DNS Manager section you can connect your GoDaddy domain to google cloud. That ‘A’ records will contain the external IP address of your Google Cloud VM Instances. Having said that – you  also can archive that by using Google Cloud DNS (tutorial) or any third party DNS. Before starting this tutorial let’s give you a little explanation, 

DNS:

DNS is a system which find the IP Address of a website (domain).
Domain name e.g. www.google.com is just like your smartphone contact name and IP address is like phone number.
Can you call someone with just contact name, of course not you can’t, you need a phone number, just like you need an IP Address to visit a website. There are billions of websites and every hour thousands of new website are created.  The systems which store and manage that huge data of  Domain names and IP addresses is called Domain Name System or DNS.

DNS Nameserver:

In a nut shell DNS Nameservers stored your server IP address. When someone trying access your domain they send a query to the nameserver and nameserver responds it with your IP address.  There are two kinds of DNS nameservers, Authoritative Nameserver and non-authoritative Nameserver. The nameserver which has your server IP address is called Authoritative Nameserver, example – GoDaddy’s DNS server, Google Cloud DNS, AWS route 53, Other third-party DNS-s. And the nameservers which does not know your server IP address but know the name of the server which has the IP address is called non-authoritative nameservers, example- Root nameservers, TLD nameservers etc.
 

As you can see in the Image, User send a query to the DNS root Nameserver, root server replay it with TLD nameserver IP address, After that user again send a query to the DNS tld nameserver and tld server replay with it GoDaddy DNS server. Finally, user send a query to the GoDaddy nameserver and get your server IP address.

So, In this tutorial we are going to add your server (Google Cloud VM instances) IP address in you GoDaddy DNS nameserver by adding A record in it.

So, let’s get started,

 

Step 1: Opening GoDaddy DNS Manager

Go to your GoDaddy website and login to your Godaddy account by clicking the ‘Sing In’ Button.

After that click on the home button and navigate to ‘Manage My Products’.

Next Open the DNS Manager by clicking the ‘DNS’ button. 

Now, scroll down to Nameservers section and make sure that you are using default nameservers.

If you are seeing different nameserver, then it means that you are using a third-party DNS server such as Cloudflare, google cloud DNS, AWS route 53 etc. In this situation you have two options, either You can go to the DNS provider’s website and add A record from there or you can change the nameserver to default.

Step 2: Coping Your Google Cloud VM's external IP

Login to  your Google Cloud  dashboard and click the hamburger menu in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

Now hover over Compute Engine and Click on VM Instances.

Now, Copy the external IP address of your Google cloud VM.

Step 3: Adding/Editing A record

Now back to your GoDaddy website’s tab, and click on  button under the Records tab.

  1. Type: As record type, choose A.
  2. Host: Choose the host for the domain/subdomain that you want to point to your Google Cloud. In this example, we have chosen a naked domain(siteyaar.com) so Under Host, type @ if you’re going to point a domain (such as mysite.com).
  3. Points to: Enter the external IP address of your Google cloud server. In this example, it is 35.238.221.27
  4. TTL (Time To Live):  TTL value tells your browser how long a record should be stored in cached before a new copy of the record must be retrieved from DNS. Select custom or use the default one.
  5. Click  to apply the settings.

Example 1: For main domain – siteyaar.com

 If you want to use your naked domain type @ in the Host field.

@ – represent your domain name.

Example 2: For sub-domain – www.siteyaar.com

If you want to use your domain with www then type in the host field.

Example 4: For wildcard sub-domain – *.siteyaar.com

If you type * in host field, it will create a wildcard record.

* – A wildcard record acts as a catch-all record, which means that it redirects every subdomain you haven’t defined elsewhere to an IP address.

Step 4: Editing or Deleting DNS records

Editing and deleting DNS records are straightforward on GoDaddy.

– First, select your target record, and in this example, we have A record and then click on the  edit button as shown below

– Now, If you want to edit your DNS record, you may click on the required field and edit and click on Save to save changes.

– Or, if you want to delete your DNS record, then you may click on the  trash button located in the top right corner.

Step 5: Verifying DNS propagation

Once you have added/updated the DNS records, it can take time up to 24 hours for the changes to be effective across the internet.

You can check the status of your domain(s) propagation by using some available online tool such as dnschecker.org 

Conclusion

If you are using google cloud as a web server for hosting your website then I recommand you to use a third party DNS server such as Google cloud DNS, Cloudflare etc. GoDaddy(s) default DNS is slower than Google Cloud DNS, Cloudflare, AWS route 53. By changing your GoDaddy DNS you can decrease your website(s) load time. 

Now it is your time!

I tried my best to provide you a complete tutorial on  How to Connect your GoDaddy domain to Google Cloud VM Instances. I hope you liked it.

If you need help just drop a comment.

If you benefited from this tutorial, and would like to support my work, please like my Facebook page.

Thanks,

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