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I'm trying to set up an A Record for a naked domain. I use fasthosts. I'm being asked for "the ip address of your webserver" : https://help.fasthosts.co.uk/app/answers/detail/a_id/1913/~/setting-up-dns-a-records. noob!

Just to check, have you seen this help page?

If you have, and what you're trying to do is set up yourdomain.com so that it redirects to www.yourdomain.com (I see you have a web app set up for the www one) then I think this fasthosts help page is what you want -- you shouldn't need to have to add an A record manually, they do it all behind the scenes.

Tried it, as far as i can tell, that feature is for forwarding other domains (mysite.com to mysite.co.uk) when i do a domain health report i get this error come up: The DNS "A" record for your domain name is a Domain Name System (DNS) entry that tells computers on the Internet where to find your website. There are usually two "A" records, one for newsshuffle.com and another for www.newsshuffle.com, and these should both point to the IP address of your web hosting server.

The website for 'newsshuffle.com' does not point to your web hosting with Fasthosts. The root "A" record currently points to 213.171.195.105 and the "www" record points to 50.19.109.98. To correct this issue follow our guide Setting up DNS "A" records to create an "A" record for www.newsshuffle.com to point to your web server IP address

when i follow the link it looks really simple to do but i cant just use 'xxxx.pythonanywhere.com' like i did for CNAME. and can only assign an ip. Do you think its just the ip in the error message? not comfortable with messing around with this sort of thing!

I think its sorted, sorry!

The reason you can't use a CNAME is because DNS doesn't allow CNAMEs for naked domains. (Well, technically it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's pretty much the upshot.)

I see what you mean, though -- fasthosts' website redirection feature does look extremely primitive. Most providers will allow you to set up a CNAME for www.yourdomain.com and then redirect requests to yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com.

I recommend you ask their tech support if you can do that specifically; there might be a way to do it that neither of us have been able to find on their site.

If the worst comes to the worst, and they just don't support it... then I reckon the best you can do is set the A record on the domain to the IP address they quote in the error message you quote above (the one starting with 50). Then you'll need to set up a new web app that mirrors your www.newsshuffle.com one for the newsshuffle.com site -- that's actually pretty easy to do, instructions here.

Ah, just saw your last message -- great news!

How did you wind up fixing it? It could be useful info for any other customers who are using fasthosts.

yeh its not fixed, you're right i think its just that their sites a bit useless, will contact them for help, cheers

OK, just let us know if there's anything you need from our side.