I am trying to host my first website + service.
#My server setup
I have a static webpage in server 1. A gotosocial installation in server 2. They are connected to a reverse proxy (server 3). This has a public IP of (not exact) 204.230.30.104.
#My router setup
I can open ports 80 and 443. I just don’t know to which IP (I’ll explain why down).
#My registrar
In have a domain, say ‘newexample.com’. The @ has an A record for the IP (not exact) 208.145.80.33
#My confusion
- If I want to make a subdomin for GoToSocial like ‘gts.social.new example.com’, do I use CNAME or A record?
- If I want to serve the static website to be served at ‘www.newexample.com’ , do I remake an A record for www.newexample.com ?
- There appears to be a CNAME in my DNS record already by the registrar for www that goes to some “redirect” link. What’s up with that?
- How do I make the domain connect to my server and how to make the server connect to my domain properly?
An A record maps to an IP address. A CNAME record maps to another URL. Since you are trying to map to an IP address rather than a URL, you will want an A record.
If all of your sites will be served from the same proxy server at 204.230.30.104, you can create a single, wildcard A record for *.newexample.com. This will point every subdomain to your proxy’s IP address. You don’t need to create an A record for each subdomain.
If you are planning on serving some subdomains from 204.230.30.104 and other subdomains from another proxy at 69.4.20.187, you would need multiple A records for pointing the subdomains toward their respective proxies.
If you wanted to serve from proxy running on a dynamic IP address, and you’re using a DDNS provider to point newexample.ddns.net back to your current IP address, you could use a CNAME record to point newexample.com to newexample.ddns.net.
Thanks for the reply. That makes sense. I now understand how to point the domains / subdomains using “A” record.
Could you please also clarify which IP I need to open ports 80 and 443 to, in the router? Or does the IP in the router actually refer to the internal IP device addresses? (Like 142.168.0.6, etc)?
Your 142.x.x.x will be your public IP address. All devices on your network share that public IP. They all have a unique private IP address too, accessible only on your network. It probably starts with 192.168.x.x, but it could be 10.x.x.x or even less likely 172.16–31.x.x.
If you want to operate a web server that users can go to by typing https://youdomain.com/, you’ll need to forward from ports 80 and 443 through to the internal IP address of your server, using the “port forwarding” settings on your router. What port on the internal IP you route to depends on how your server is configured. But a basic default configuration is fairly likely to be 80 and 443, too.
Since you have a reverse proxy, all traffic from your router should go to that. Then you use that to send the appropriate traffic to the appropriate server based on whatever rules you want to apply. (e.g. siteone.mydomain.com goes to server 1, sitetwo.mydomain.com goes to server 2, or mydomain.com/siteone goes to server 1, etc.).
It depends on how you want to do it; how your reverse proxy server is setup. I use Pangolin running on a VPS as my proxy server. It uses a tunnel (“Newt”) between web servers running on my home network and the VPS, so I don’t need any open/forwarded ports on my home router.