Domain Not Working

You connected your own domain and it is not showing your site. Almost always this is DNS, and almost always it is fixable.

1. Give it time first

DNS changes are not instant. They spread across the internet gradually, and it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a full day.

If you added your records in the last hour, the honest answer is to wait. Checking every five minutes will not speed it up, and it will make you change something that was already correct.

2. Check the records match exactly

Go back to your domain registrar, the company you bought the domain from, and compare what is there against what Vivreal gave you:

Things that quietly break this:

• A trailing dot, or a missing one. Some registrars want example.com. and some want example.com.
• The full domain in the Name field. Most registrars want just www, not www.yourcompany.com. Putting the whole thing in creates www.yourcompany.com.yourcompany.com.
• A space copied in at either end of the value.
• The verification record missing. Both records need to be there. The site will not verify on the CNAME alone.

3. Root domains are different

If you want yourcompany.com to work without the www, a plain CNAME often will not do it. You usually need an ALIAS or ANAME record instead.

Not every registrar supports these. If yours does not, the usual answer is to point www at your site and set the bare domain to forward to it. Your registrar's support pages will call this domain forwarding or redirection.

4. Clear out the old records

If the domain used to point at another website, the old records are probably still there fighting with the new ones.

Look for an existing A record or CNAME on the same name and delete it. Two records claiming the same name is the most common reason a domain half works, loading the old site for some visitors and the new one for others.

5. Security warnings during setup

A warning about the connection not being private, in the first hour or so after connecting, is usually just the certificate not having finished being issued. It sorts itself out once the domain verifies.

If it is still there the next day, the verification record has not been found, so go back to step 2.

Checking your work

You can look up what the internet currently sees for your domain using any free DNS lookup tool. Search for one, enter your domain, and compare the answer to what Vivreal gave you. If they match and it still is not working, the change simply has not spread yet.

Still stuck

Your registrar's support team can see your DNS settings and you cannot easily show them to anyone else, so they are usually the fastest people to ask. Tell them you are adding a CNAME and a verification record for a hosted website, and show them the values from Vivreal.