How to Point a Domain to a VPS: A Records, www and SSL

To point a domain to a VPS, create an A record for the root domain (@) that contains your server's IPv4 address, add an AAAA record if the VPS has IPv6, and point www to the same server with a CNAME or a second A record. Once DNS updates, configure the web server on the VPS to answer for that domain.

That is the whole idea. The rest of this guide shows exactly which records to create, how to verify them from your terminal, and what to do on the server so visitors see your site instead of an error page.

What you need before you start

• A registered domain and access to the place where its DNS is managed. For domains registered at mistREG, that is the DNS section of the mistREG panel.
• A VPS with a public IP address. On a mistREG KVM VPS, the IP and root password appear in your panel within about 60 seconds of payment.
• SSH access to the server so you can install and configure a web server.
• Ten minutes. The records take seconds to add; the waiting is DNS caches catching up.

Do not have a server yet? You can create an account, top up and order a KVM VPS in Slovenia (EU) with NVMe SSD and AMD EPYC hardware from the plans section.

A records or nameservers: two ways to connect a domain

There are two ways to connect a domain to a VPS, and mixing them up is the most common source of confusion.

For a single website on a single VPS, use records. At mistREG your zone is already hosted on Cloudflare's authoritative DNS network, so you only add an A record and you are done. Switching to custom nameservers moves the domain out of that zone, and every record then has to be recreated at the new DNS host.

Step by step: point your domain to a VPS

1. Copy the server IP — Open your VPS in the panel and copy its IPv4 address (and IPv6 if one is assigned).
2. Open the DNS zone — In the mistREG panel, go to your domain and open DNS management.
3. Remove conflicting records — Delete any old A, AAAA or CNAME records for @ and www that point to parking pages or a previous host. Leave MX and TXT records alone.
4. Add the A record — Type A, name @, value your IPv4 address. Choose a short TTL such as 300 seconds while you test.
5. Add the www record — Either a CNAME from www to your root domain, or a second A record for www with the same IP.
6. Add AAAA if you have IPv6 — Only if the server is actually listening on IPv6. A broken AAAA record is worse than none.
7. Verify and configure the server — Check the records with dig, then set up the web server and HTTPS as described below.

Example DNS records

Here is what a typical zone looks like for a site on one VPS. The IP addresses are documentation examples; replace them with your own.

The CAA record is optional. It tells certificate authorities which of them may issue certificates for your domain. The mistREG panel supports 20 record types, including all of the above; our guide to DNS record types explains what each one does.

How to check that the domain points to your VPS

Do not rely on your browser, which caches aggressively. Ask DNS directly from a terminal:

dig +short example.com A
dig +short www.example.com
dig +short example.com AAAA
nslookup example.com 1.1.1.1

If dig returns your server IP, the record is live. If it returns an old IP, resolvers are still serving a cached answer; that clears once the old TTL expires. How long this takes, and why different networks see changes at different times, is covered in our article on DNS propagation time.

Records created at mistREG are DNS only, which means dig shows your real server IP rather than a proxy address. That makes debugging straightforward: what you see is where the traffic goes.

Configure the VPS to answer for the domain

DNS only delivers visitors to the right machine. The server still has to know which site to serve. On a fresh Linux VPS the usual steps are:

1. Install a web server such as Nginx, Apache or Caddy.
2. Create a site configuration with your domain and www as server names. In Nginx that is the server_name line; in Apache, ServerName and ServerAlias.
3. Open the firewall for ports 80 and 443.
4. Issue an SSL certificate once DNS resolves to the VPS. Tools like Certbot validate over port 80, so the A record must already point to the server.
5. Redirect HTTP to HTTPS and pick one canonical host, either www or the bare domain.

A quick way to test the server before DNS has fully updated is to request the site by IP with the right host header, for example curl -I -H Host:example.com http://203.0.113.10. If that returns your site's headers, the server side is ready and anything left is DNS caching.

Moving an existing site? Copy files and the database to the new VPS first, test it with the method above, and only then change the A record. Visitors keep hitting the old server until the switch, so there is no downtime window.

If you prefer a control panel over the command line, mistREG Plesk hosting with LiteSpeed Web Server handles virtual hosts and certificates for you, and it is also set up in about 60 seconds.

Do not break email and other records

Pointing a domain to a VPS changes where the website lives, not where email is delivered. Keep these in mind:

• MX records stay pointing at your email provider unless you are running a mail server on the VPS.
• SPF, DKIM and DMARC are TXT records. Do not delete them while cleaning up old A records.
• Subdomains like api or app each need their own A or CNAME record if they should reach the VPS.
• Reverse DNS (PTR) for the server IP matters if the VPS sends email; it is configured for the IP, not in the domain's zone.

Troubleshooting: domain not pointing to the server

Still stuck? Message support on Telegram at @mistnetwork or open a ticket from the panel; the team is available 24/7. Background on how resolution works is on Wikipedia's DNS article, and answers to account questions are in the FAQ.