Why is my heroku hosted bluehost domain www.rememberlenny.com different from rememberlenny.com

Question

I have uploaded a rails application to Heroku. I have a domain hosted with bluehost. I have assigned the domain to bluehost and set the CNAME properties of the WWW record point to the herokuapps URL. I have the @ A-record pointing to the bluehost shared Host ip address. Because I dont have a HerokuApps unique IP address, I havn't assigned an A-Record.

Currently when I go to the www.rememberlenny.com and the rememberlenny.com, they are displaying two seperate sites.

Today I changed the domain record of the CNAME on WWW to the heroku app. The non-WWW domain propagates to the old shared hosting location. I want both the www.rememberlenny.com and rememberlenny.com to show the same place.

Do I wait for the DNS change to propogate, or is there some setting that I am not changing the host records?

Answer 1

Your ttl is set to 14400 or 4 hours. It's always a good idea to set that very low BEFORE you need to change the DNS records.

Here is info on heroku dns settings: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains

Heroku does NOT support A records on the bare domains name (without the www), so you need to change that to a url redirect or forward record and remove the A record on the bare domain.

Answer 2

I have tried configuring Heroku custom domains using Bluehost and Hostmonster in the past (currently use Hostmonster), and in their CPanel DNS Zone Editor the TTL (time to live) for any DNS changes is 14400, or 4 hours.

I tried to lower this setting, and they don't permit it. There's no way around it - you have to accept their default TTL of 4 hours. I'm really hoping my change works, because the idea of a 4 hour trial and error cycle sounds dreadful.

Anyway, hope this answer sheds some light on what has been a hellish process - trying to get Heroku to play nicely with Hostmonster's DNS settings.

D.