Adding the records at your provider

The records Issue Mint asks for are the same at every provider. What differs is where the fields are, what they are called, and two habits that account for nearly every record that will not verify. Each guide below walks the same record set through one provider’s screens.

Pick the guide for whoever answers DNS for your domain, which is not always where you bought it.

The guides

• 123 Reg
• Amazon Route 53
• Cloudflare
• DNSimple
• Gandi
• GoDaddy
• Hover
• IONOS
• Namecheap
• Netlify
• Porkbun
• Squarespace
• Vercel

Your DNS may not be where you bought the domain

Records go wherever the nameservers point, which is the registrar unless somebody has moved it.

Moving DNS is common and easily forgotten: a domain bought at one registrar and then put behind Cloudflare, or handed to Netlify or Vercel along with a website, answers from there instead. Records added at the old registrar in that situation are saved successfully and have no effect at all, which is the most confusing way for this to fail. If you are not sure, the guide you want is for whichever control panel shows your existing records, because that is by definition the one in charge.

What the host field wants

Providers split into two kinds, and the difference is whether they add your domain to the host you type.

Some want a bare label, so you enter go and the provider stores go.example.com. Others want the whole hostname, so you enter go.example.com yourself. Entering the full hostname into a field of the first kind produces go.example.com.example.com, which resolves to nothing and is the single most common typing mistake here. Issue Mint prints what it found underneath what it expected, so the doubled domain is visible in the table, and a record that will not verify has the rest of the list.

The @ in the Host column means the domain itself, and most providers accept either @ or an empty field for it.

Whether the root of your domain can be a CNAME

The other real difference, and the only one that changes what your address ends up being.

The root of a domain cannot literally hold a CNAME, so a provider has to answer for it by resolving our target and handing back addresses instead. Many do, sometimes under a name like ALIAS, ANAME or CNAME flattening, and Cloudflare does it at the root as a matter of course. Where a provider does not, www verifies and the root does not, and Issue Mint offers www.yourdomain.com as your address instead. That is one click and reversible, and the bare domain or www covers what changes.

What every guide has in common

The same records, the same copy buttons and the same verification.

Whichever provider you are on, the records are generated for you when you add the domain, the records page explains what each one does, and Issue Mint checks them against public DNS every ten minutes for the first two days. Until they pass, your newsletter carries on working on its issuemint.com address, so none of this is a step you have to finish before you can publish, and the archive website works the same on either address.

One provider-specific warning is worth repeating outside its own guide. On Cloudflare, every record Issue Mint asks for must be set to DNS only, the grey cloud rather than the orange one, because a proxied record answers with Cloudflare’s values instead of yours and a correct record then reads as missing.