So here is the problem. Hover just doesn’t handle forwards sensibly. Who have you had better experience with.
a-view.org (WITHOUT https://) resolves to https://test-view.onrender.com. hover says there is NO WAY to forward from https://a-view.org because there is no cert associated with a-view.org. I suppose that is true. But, I didn’t have that problem with Digital Ocean hosting a ghost site and the DNS records with Hover as the registrar.
The other problem with the hover approach (a records to themselves, with a forward to test-view.onrender.com) is that users have to delete https:// when they type in a-view.org. Every modern browser tries to enforce https for secure browsing so users have to manually delete the https://–which they never do for anything else. So, this is a non-starter.
So, tell me that this works correctly with cloudflare or cheapnames. I am happy to kiss hover goodby. they may be well priced and basically ethical, but apparently technically limited. The support person actually recommended cloudflare. But, what she meant was keep the domain name at Hover, so they got the renew fee for doing nothing, and host the DNS records at cloudflare (which was basically what I was doing with Digital Ocean and Hawkhost (for some older wordpress blogs)).
I want to move the whole shebang to another provider. There is no reason to keep paying hover for being a technically limited registrar.
How can I verify if this will work correctly at cloudflare or namecheap or anyone else.
Sorry this is long. I thought this would be trivial but nothing is trivial.
I have chosen to disregard Hover’s instructions and followed Render’s.
I now have: A @ 216.24.57.1
I also had not filled in the field in the custom domains area. I have done so now.
It seems to have not propagated yet.
it is possible that I will have to go back to Hover’s recommentation of A records to hover with a forward.
it is possible that the problem with the URLs within the site was caused by not putting in the name in Render’s field (which must control how url’s appear for the <>.onrender.com site name.
Too many moving parts and too slow to test what is happening.
The results look a little different than your doc. the CNAME record for www.a-view.org resolves to www when saved. CNAME flattening is turned on automatically. Assume this is all right.
However, the intermediate links come up as https://test-view.onrender.com/. This is not the end of the world though when someone might copy/paste a link or save it to readlater or pinboard, etc–the link is not to the root domain. At some point I need to get rid of test-view (this is a holdover from getting things setup). The saved links will naturally break.
Is there a way to solve this? Sort of seems like there should be.