Question
Can't access website by domain name, but can by IP
- Posted on May 25, 2019
- Ubuntu 16.04DNS
Asked by Kevin Thomas
I submitted this question to support about a month ago, but as I haven’t received a response yet I figured I’d ask the community:
I have a droplet setup with an IP of 134.209.63.71. On this droplet, I have setup a website (I setup ssh authentication and can use SFTP to transfer my website to the server, I also setup NGINX and a ufw firewall per DigitalOcean instructions). I also have the domain “kevinthomas.dev” registered through Google Domains. In Google Domains, I’m using Google’s name servers and have setup a custom resource “A” record pointing the kevinthomas.dev domain to the IP of 134.209.63.71. However, when I try and enter “kevinthomas.dev” in my browser, it will not connect. I can access the website by typing in the IP directly, but can’t access it by the domain name.
I have already contacted Google Domains about this and they told me that, from their end, everyone looks setup correctly, and that I should wait 48 hours for the DNS to propagate. I’ve waited over 3 days now, and it’s still not working, and when I contacted them again they told me that, once again, everything looks fine on their end, so I should contact the place that is hosting my server. I’m not sure what steps to take at this point to get my domain working.
Thanks in advance for any help!
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Hey there!
First, I just want to apologize, as you didn’t seem to receive our reply to your ticket. One of my colleagues was able to address your ticket on April 29, but it doesn’t look like that made it to you!
I can see that your domain is trying to connect through port 443 (https://) which seems to be blocked:
$ telnet 134.209.63.71 443 Trying 134.209.63.71… telnet: connect to address 134.209.63.71: Operation timed out telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
I can also see that your domain loads fine with http:// and can be verified using the below curl result:
$ curl -IL kevinthomas.dev HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.10.3 (Ubuntu)
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2019 06:27:19 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 2349
Last-Modified: Sun, 28 Apr 2019 00:51:20 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: “5cc4f908-92d”
Accept-Ranges: bytes
That being the case, you’ll want to check a few things.
You can list the services that are running on your Droplet with the following command: sudo lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN -P
Do you see Nginx running on port 443 on the list? If yes, the most likely issue is that your firewall is impacting connections. Please ensure that Port 443 is allowed through any firewalls you have running on the Droplet.
If you do not see it there, the most likely issue is a wrongly configured server block. You will need to check your Nginx configuration and ensure that you have a VirtualHost set up for your domain on Port 443. Here’s some further documentation that will help: http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/configuring_https_servers.html
Hope this helps!
First try sudo service apache2 restart works for me
Wow, just spent a half day tracking down this problem. This problem is Chrome & Firefox now force .dev (and .foo) domains to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS. To fix this you an either serve via HTTPS or disable network.stricttransportsecurity.preloadlist in about:config in Firefox. You can edit chrome://net-internals/#hsts in Chrome but it does not allow users to delete preloaded HSTS settings!! More links below: