DigitalOcean DNS Entries from Remote Domain

Question

so I recently set up a droplet on DigitalOcean. For those who don't know, a Droplet is just a virtual server which in my case is running nginx on Ubuntu 20.

Each droplet is given a static ip address and I can connect to my server using that, no problems there.

But typing the IP every time is not what I want. We have a domain where our main website is running, say its example.com. We bought this domain on a different domain provider which has nothing to do with DigitalOcean. I want to direct sub.example.com to the DigitalOcean droplet.

So what I have done is created an A Record for the subdomain which directs to the Droplets IP. I have done this using the control panel from the domain hosting where the main domain is living.

When I look up the domain sub.example.com on a DNS Record Checker I can see that the entry is correctly saved for all locations. Still, when I type it in to my browser I just get a timeout and cant connect at all.

I have certbot installed on that droplet for that subdomain sub.example.com.

Anyone has an idea what I could check? Here is my nginx config for the virtual host:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;
    server_name sub.example.com;
    root /var/www/sub.example.com/public;

    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";

    index index.php;

    charset utf-8;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    error_page 404 /index.php;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }
}
server {
    server_name sub.example.com; # managed by Certbot
    root /var/www/sub.example.com/public;

    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";

    index index.php;

    charset utf-8;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    error_page 404 /index.php;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }


    listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on; # managed by Certbot
    listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/sub.example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/sub.example.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot

}
server {
    if ($host = sub.example.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot


    listen 80 ;
    listen [::]:80 ;
    server_name sub.example.com;
    return 404; # managed by Certbot


}

Answer 1

I resolved the issue by providing the necessary Domain settings inside DigitalOcean itself, so it needed both the DNS on the Domainserver and on DigitalOcean.