Using the A Record with your site collection¶

Disadvantages of A records¶

If you use an A record to forward DNS requests for your website to a specific IP address, your site collection’s primary website can experience the following issues:

• You can only create A records for your second-level domains (not subdomains). For example, you can use an A record to point example.com to an IP address, but not www.example.com. Your DNS provider must point the www subdomain to your Site Factory site collection for you.
• To maintain high availability, Site Factory uses a dynamic cloud infrastructure and elastic IP (EIP) addresses to guarantee high availability. Tying your site collection to a single IP address can compromise its high availability.
• If your site collection is moved from one IP address to another (for maintenance or other technical reasons), your domain forwarding will no longer work until you update the DNS record to reflect the new IP address.
• If the Site Factory team has to change your site collection’s IP address in a hurry (for emergency fixes, for example), there might not be time to warn you of the change beforehand.

Procedure¶

To point your domain name at your site collection using an A Record:

1. On your computer, open a terminal or command prompt window and run the following command to obtain your site collection’s IP address:

   host [site_name].[SF_domain].com
   

   where [site_name] is your site collection’s name, and [SF_domain] is the domain name for Site Factory.

   You must enter the complete Site Factory URL of your website.

2. Record the IP address displayed by the host command.

3. Follow your DNS provider’s instructions to set up an A Record pointing your domain name to your site collection’s IP address.

Troubleshooting domain issues¶

You can add domain names to only one environment. If you try to add a domain name to multiple environments, Site Factory will display a logged warning message and send you an email message like the following example:

The following domains could not be added to the [sitename] site [domain
list]. If you wish to add this domain to the [sitename] site, remove it
from the site that has claimed the domain and then add it again at
[factory URL].

To resolve the problem, remove the domain name from both environments and then add the domain name to the single, appropriate environment.