Pointing Godaddy domain to Heroku app

Godaddy is basically a website building, domain registrar, and web hosting platform that helps professionals to start an online store or a small-scale business website. It also offers shared VPS and dedicated hosting services to help you manage your store wherever you are using your mobile phone.

Why Connecting GoDaddy and Heroku is challenging:

While you are looking for several ways to redirect your Godaddy app to Heroku, it can sometimes get a bit challenging due to the following reasons:

• Heroku only provides ANAME or ALIAS, and CNAMe records that Godaddy does not have.
• While Heroku gives you an option to add Custom now to get more help for your appDomains, the format of the domain is not really clear.
• When you add a Custom domain, the domain you want to point to is cut off on the Heroku site.
• The https still needs to be managed carefully on the DNS side, and SSL also requires you to upgrade o a Hobby Plan in Heroku.

Solution of these Challenges

In Godaddy:

• Set up a Domain Forwarding to point the “www” version of your domain to the “https.”
• To point to the website, Heroku provides you an option to add a CNAME record for “www.”

In Heroku:

• Pay to upgrade to the hobby plan in order to make your site load faster amd have https://
• Setup the WWW version, such as www.yoursite.com instead of your-site.com

Pointing Godaddy Domain to Heroku App

Are you looking for ways to point your Godaddy Domain to Heroku? Worry not! Here we give you 5 easy steps to point your domain to the Heroku app:

Add Custom Domain

Add a custom domain on Heroku
$ heroku domains: add www.myapp.com

Configure DNS

• Go to Godaddy and configure DNS
• Login to Godaddy and click the “DNS zone file” tab
• Under the CName section, click Add record and select Record Type as “CName.”
• In Host set www
• In Points to set your Heroku app link to myapp.heroku.com

Trouble Shoot

• Now, if someone goes to “www.myapp.com,” they will be directed to your Heroku app.
• Wait, But what if someone goes to myapp.com (not with www), then the link will not work? You need to add forwarding from myapp.com to www.myapp.com
• To add forwarding, Go to the settings tab -> forwarding section.
• Add new forwarding (without masking) from myapp.com to www.myapp.com
• Congratulations! you are all done!

Please take note that the changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate across the internet. So, be patient 🙂

Final Thoughts

Taking a deeper look at these solutions might help you save a few minutes and clicks and make your website visible to the world. Make sure to follow the instructions properly to avoid any more issues.