I was recently trying to send an email to a domain I had purchased on GoDaddy but had hosting on Digital Ocean.

I sent the email and a couple hours later it bounced. This wasn’t good. My email was going to GoDadddy but I want the site hosted on Digital Ocean.

So I had to find how to keep the domain hosted on Digital Ocean but the email needs to stay on GoDaddy servers.

Here are the DNS settings I used:

GoDaddy Digital Ocean DNS Records

Your settings may differ, so please follow these instructions in order to check if your settings are correct:

  • Log into GoDaddy
  • Launch the domain you are looking to check
  • Go to the email tab
  • Hover over tools and click “Server Settings”
  • You will see a popup showing all the settings

There you can see that there are a bunch of records listed. These are the ones for your specific domain.

GoDaddy Default MX and DNS Records

Hopefully this was helpful because it took a long time to figure out! It is even more painful because the records take a while to propogate. Boo!