Today I spent half a day trying to migrate a website. We ended purchasing new grid hosting on godaddy for a domain and went a head configuring and setting up everything. The process seemed easy at first – the setup only took a few minutes and then we just waited. The most complex part was to configure DNS and nameservers. You complete this step when you configure the hosting and I thought I completed this section correctly. So I just waited… and it should have been updated within 4 hours but it appeared that the website wasn’t active. We waited for a few hours and then I decided to look into this further. I checked the Account Summary page and noticed that the A record didn’t exist. I found this quite odd. I checked the godaddy help pages to confirm the nameservers and this what was on the page:

July 27, 2009 — Present
ns25.domaincontrol.com
ns26.domaincontrol.com

So obviously I used the above servers since I just signed up for the hosting. I waited for a few more hours and still the site was not alive. Feeling frustrated I knew it had to be a DNS issue. Upon further investigating the issue I noticed that the nameserves configures in the DNS Domain Manager was different to what was on the website help pages. This is what I saw (scroll to the bottom of the DNS Domain Manager):

godaddy grid hosting nameservers

The solution was simple: I changed the nameservers to ns01.domaincontrol.com and ns02.domaincontrol.com and it worked straightaway. To verify the DNS I used a website called http://www.zoneedit.com – this way I could make sure that my ISP wasn’t the cause of DNS not propagating the change.

Attached Files: