How do I manage DNS with Godaddy but host the site at infinityfree.net?

Question

Here's my situation. I used to host a site for a friend and now I want to migrate them to infinityfree.net since it's free and they're ok with it. Currently, they bought the domain name through GoDaddy and I host the site via Bluehost.com. So, they have the nameservers point to ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com. Is my understanding correct that now Bluehost is managing all of the DNS records?

What I would like it to do is, I want them to manage all of the DNS through GoDaddy but host the site via infinityfree.net. However, looking at this https://infinityfree.net/support/add-your-own-domain/ it seems like they need to point the nameservers to infinityfree.net. Does this mean that they have to manager the DNS through infinityfree.net?

How do I configure such that they manage the DNS through Godaddy but then when they go to www.theirdomain.com and it goes to the site via infinityfree.net?

Answer 1

You are correct that changing the NS records to Infinityfree would have them manage the DNS records. You can use GoDaddy as your DNS host, but it isn't recommended and has some caveats. InfinityFree has instructions here.

1. InfinityFree advises that they may change the IP address of your website occasionally without prior notice. They update their own DNS servers, but when you use GoDaddy's DNS, they have no way of doing that.
2. You should use CNAME or ALIAS records when possible because unlike A records, they will still work when IP addresses change.
3. CNAME records work fine for subdomains (like www), but are not allowed for the bare domain apex record. If you try to create CNAME at the domain apex, your domain's email won't get delivered and your website may not work reliably.
4. GoDaddy only supports A and CNAME records. GoDaddy does not implement ALIAS records.

So if you want to use GoDaddy, you will need to put an A record in place for the domain apex and a CNAME in place for www. You will then need to periodically check if your hosting IP address has changed and update your domain apex A record. This means that your website will have downtime when the IP address of your hosting changes.

Given this limitation of GoDaddy DNS hosting, it would make sense to me to use the DNS hosting provided by InfinityFree instead of trying to use GoDaddy as your DNS host.