How to move your Domain to DigitalOcean without changing your Name Servers

I recently moved my domain from AppEngine to DigitalOcean. You can read about it here Going Static

DigitalOcean’s guide How To Set Up a Host Name with DigitalOcean to move your domain mentions that you need to change your Name Servers to that of DigitalOcean. However if you do not wish to migrate a lot of records and do not wish to change your name servers, read on.

Change A-Records

In case you do not wish to change your Name Servers, you can also point your domain’s A records to your DigitalOcean server IP. Similarly you also need to point your sub-domains to your DO IP. Note that you’ll need to create A records - and not CNAME records.

To change your A-Records, you need to access the control panel of your domain registrar.

Once you configured this, your information will take a while to propagate and should be up and supported in a few hours (or up to a 48 hours).

With this setup, you will not have to move all your CNAME/MX records to DigitalOcean. You can still have those set at your domain registrar’s control panel. For example, I still have my previous CNAME records intact at my domain registrar. That is I only moved the “www” and “ww2” to A-records pointing to DigitalOcean VPS.

Whilst, I am not a networking expert - the above setup works for me. This should work with any other VPS too. If you have a better option or concern due to the above setup, place a comment below.

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