‘A Records’

  • Unknown's avatar
    gmilley · Member ·

    Where do I find the A Records?

  • staff-mckluskey · Staff ·

    Hi there!

    If you’re trying to map your domain to your WordPress.com site, you’ll need to change the nameservers as explained here:

    https://wordpress.com/support/domains/map-existing-domain/#change-your-domains-name-servers

    We do not recommend doing that suing A records, as these may change causing your domain to stop working until you update your DNS records again.
    If your registrar doesn’t allow the nameservers to be changed, let us know here or reach out from https://wordpress.com/help/contact and we’ll help you out.

  • Unknown's avatar
    gmilley · Member ·

    OK – thanks, but totally confused. Microsoft, from whom I purchased the domain and am paying for it via their Office 365 Business Premium service, is telling me that I need the A Records for purposes of mapping to the domain.

    I understand you are telling me no, I should not do this.

    I must be one of millions in exactly the same place between WordPress and Microsoft; what should I do?

    Thank you.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi, we’d still recommend managing your own DNS (or rather, letting us take care of it for you). Any settings they need to give you can be done with CNAMEs and txt records — which you could set and forget for the most part. Here’s how you can add whatever records they want for you:

    Manage Your DNS Records

    Support can help you with this when you’ve added a plan and your mapping.

    If they insist on managing your DNS for you though, here’s how to find what your A records are today. Use a command prompt and type this, subbing your real domain name:

    nslookup yourgroovydomain.com ns1.wordpress.com

    That will report your current IP addresses. Just note those can change, and if they do, your site would stop working. You would need to have the settings updated again on their end.

    I hope this makes sense! DNS can get fairly technical. If you have questions, let us know.

  • Unknown's avatar
    gmilley · Member ·

    Thanks for you note. I ran the commands as instructed and put it into DNS manager for O365. Please confirm if the settings I copied below are correct?

    If not, please advise and please tell me how to get in touch with the technician or group that could get the A Records. Thank you

    Type Host name Points to address or value TTL Actions
    A @ 198.181.116.9 1 Hour
    A @ 198.181.117.9 1 Hour
    A @ 192.0.74.9 1 Hour
    CNAME www gmfinancialadvocate.com 1 Hour

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Those look correct, yes. Thank you!

    If you ever have trouble loading the site, you can run the test again to get current IPs.

  • Unknown's avatar
    gmilley · Member ·

    Hi – tried to access the site and got the message below. What should I do now? Thank you,

    Support
    Use the tool below to diagnose common problems with domain names on your WordPress.com site.

    Validating gmfinancialadvocate.com
    Incorrect A Record
    The A Record for gmfinancialadvocate.com is set to a WordPress.com nameserver. Instead, you should remove all nameservers for your domain and specify the WordPress.com nameservers below to map your domain name to a WordPress.com blog. For instructions and some important warnings before making such a change, please see this document. If you recently made this change please wait a few hours for the records to update.

    NS1.WORDPRESS.COM
    NS2.WORDPRESS.COM
    NS3.WORDPRESS.COM
    There is information on how to set up domain mapping in our support documentation. If you need help after that, please contact our support team.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @jjmilleyoutlookcom my apologies. The above trick of using our A records used to work. I didn’t realize it stopped. We must have had to stop with too many sites having issues when IPs change. Another issue could be that we need your settings here so we can properly handle SSL.

    If you’d like, we’d be happy to help you get your 365 settings copied over so you can just use our name servers. Here’s how you can do it yourself if you’d like:

    Manage Your DNS Records

    Otherwise, can you reach out to support privately with the settings you’ll need? Now that you have a plan, you can send that here:

    Contact

    And if you’d like, send the details there then update us here. :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    gmilley · Member ·

    Thanks for your note. I have been trying to handle this myself, but need to reach out to Microsoft since I really do not understand the issues. I know this can’t be so complicated and that there must be hundreds of WordPress sites sitting on O365 procured domains.

    I’m responding to your, “we’d be happy to help you get your 365 settings” but then tell me how to do it myself. Can you please send me simple instructions of exactly what to ask Microsoft for?

    Thanks much,

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Let’s try this. As others have stated if your registrar requires that you create A records, please note that our IPs change over time. Because of this, your domain might stop working at some point in the future. If that happens, please get in touch with us to find out the most current IPs and then update your A records, accordingly.

    If you still want to map your domain using A records, please be sure to create two records using these IP addresses that you can provide to Microsoft:

    192.0.78.25

    192.0.78.24

    It is strongly encouraged to add a CNAME record for the www subdomain as well (pointing to the root domain). That way, both example.com, and http://gmfinancialadvocate.com will direct to the WPCOM website.

    The records should look like this (using the universal DNS annotation):

    gmfinancialadvocate.com. 3600 A 192.0.78.24
gmfinancialadvocate.com. 3600 A 192.0.78.25
www.gmfinancialadvocate.com. 14400 CNAME gmfinancialadvocate.com.

    Also, if you have a custom domain, you can connect your domain by following this guide:

    Add Email Through Office 365

    Hope that helps.

  • Unknown's avatar
    gmilley · Member ·

    Hi – thank you very much; I much appreciate your taking the time to explain this in a way that now I understand (I’m being quite sincere).

    I will pass this note on to the Microsoft tech and now press him to make the linkages as you suggest since I do not want to have to face this again when your IPs change.

    Thanks again, I’ll post a note as to how it works out. Once I get our internal legal & regulatory compliance to approve the content of the site I likely will want to upgrade to a business account so I can access the various design plug-ins.

    Jonathan

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    You’re welcome! And yes, please keep us updated on how everything works out. We’ll be happy to further assist.

    Thanks,

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