Hi folks! New Render Support member here.
I wanted to use this thread as an opportunity to explain some details;
Concerning domains you own there are at a minimum 3 steps to consider:
- The domain’s registrar.
- The domain’s DNS provider.
- The service that DNS records point to.
Nºs 1 and 2 are frequently the same, but they don’t have to be, and in the case here they aren’t.
The domain registrar is whomever you buy the domain from. The only thing a registrar must provide is (1) the ability to purchase a domain and (2) the ability to specify who holds its DNS records. GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, Route53, Cloudflare, these are all super common Domain Registrars that many people use. When you have a registered domain, you specify nameservers (at least 2) that point to your DNS provider.
The DNS provider is whomever holds records that map names to IP addresses and other data. There are very few DNS providers that are not also registrars. Cloudflare wasn’t a registrar at first, but they finally got into that game a few years ago, they were the last example of a notable company I knew that weren’t a registrar. (Many DNS providers actually rely on a larger registrar, but they still provide the service directly.) The DNS provider then holds your DNS records so that you can point the www CNAME to yoursite.onrender.com ( Custom Domains | Render · Cloud Hosting for Developers ) for example, MX records to your email provider, etc.
And then Render is one of many possible Number 3s, we provide a service that you point a record on your domain to.
In this thread;
- GoDaddy is the registrar
- Ezoic is the DNS provider
- Render is the (end) service provider
I had a look at Ezoic’s site, and my expectation is that this individual is using their CDN service. This means that Ezoic acts as a Proxy, either to serve static assets quickly, or to cache whole page contents and serve them quickly as well. In either case, a request goes to Ezoic first, and Render second.
Render does not serve an error page with the contents “506 Variant Also Negotiates”, so I believe Ezoic is the one raising that error page. It’s unlikely that Render has anything to do with the problem, nor can we solve it because Ezoic comes earlier in the request chain. If Ezoic serves the request without sending it to Render, or during sending it to Render, Ezoic fully acts on the request before it is sent to Render. Render can’t override Ezoic because Ezoic’s response comes first, they are earlier in the chain. Any content they serve either comes before or overrides Render’s.
In short, unless it’s specifically explained what Render is doing wrong that Ezoic (acting as a CDN) doesn’t agree with, there’s nothing Render Support is able to do about this situation.
Cursory searches (https://community.cloudflare.com/t/error-506-variant-also-negotiates-since-setting-up-cloudflare/337958, https://community.ezoic.com/d/9814-variant-also-negotiates-error) also shows this error happening with sites not hosted on Render. It might be a configuration error, but it is not Render’s problem to fix.