How to connect a domain purchased from Google Domains to your server

The process of connecting a domain purchased from Google Domains is quite simple, and we will walk you through that process here! We will take you through setting up the necessary DNS records through Google Domains — you can think of DNS records as navigation instructions for your domain, in that they tell computers where to go when they lookup your domain.

To start, you'll need to grab your server's IP address from your server panel, as well as check whether it is a dedicated IP or not:

In this example, 127.0.0.1 would be the server's IP address. As it shows "Order Dedicated IP", this would also mean that the server's IP address is not a dedicated IP.

Here are the components to that IP address displayed on the panel:

• The 127.0.0.1 is the actual IP address of the server
• The 25566 is the port the server runs on. If you do not see anything after the 127.0.0.1 portion, then you have a dedicated IP (and the actual port is generally 25565)

Now that we have our server's IP address, we can proceed with actually connecting your domain to your server! To start, head over to your Google Domains panel, which is generally located here. If you're not signed into your Google Account, you may be prompted to do so. After you've logged in, click Manage next to the domain you want to link, then press DNS on the left sidebar:

Now that we've navigated to the correct area, scroll down to the bottom of the page which will take you to the Custom Resource Records section, and you'll find a few fields to input our DNS record data into, which by default will look like this:

A brief explanation of these fields, from left-to-right, are as follows:

• Host/Target: If you're wanting to use a subdomain for your players to connect to, such as mc.domain.com, then your subdomain will go here (in this example, mc would be the subdomain).
• Record Type: For connecting your Minecraft server to a domain, you'll generally only utilize an A record and an SRV record. There are other types, and you might be asked to switch this to one of those types in other use-cases (such as a CNAME record for our Advanced DDoS Protection addon). For our first record, leave this as A.
• Time-to-Live: You will pretty much always leave this as the default 1H.
• Destination/IPv4 address: You'll insert your server's IP address, without the port (25566 from our previous example), into here.

After those are filled out, simply click the Add button.

If by chance your server has a dedicated IP address, then you can stop here! If not, we'll proceed with creating a SRV record.

SRV records allow Minecraft to determine what port your server runs on, without the player explicitly specifying it.

After adding the record from the last step, the fields will reset to their default values, click the A option which will bring up a dropdown, from the list choose SRV, which will result in this:

In the first field, you will just simply set this to _minecraft._tcp — however, if you are going to utilize a subdomain (mc from our previous example) you'll add that to the end, like this _minecraft._tcp.mc

On the Service parameters text field, you will then need to start by adding 10 5 XXXXX mc.example.com, replacing XXXXX with your server's port number (which was 25566 in our example, but be sure to place the actual port number for your server here), and replace mc.example.com with the domain you are setting up. This needs to match your A record that you created, so as per our previous example that was mc.example.com however if you are not using a subdomain, you would instead replace it with just your domain, such as example.com

Your Service parameters should look something like 10 5 25566 mc.example.com, if so then go ahead and press the Add button to save your new record!

Please keep in mind that DNS changes are not instant. In most cases, it may take up to a few hours for your modifications to propagate around the internet — whilst this can technically take up to 48 hours, for most of your players this will generally only take a few hours as previously mentioned. There is no way around this, other than being patient!

If your domain still does not work after a few hours, we'd be happy to take a look and troubleshoot that with you! You can reach our support team by either opening a ticket on our website or our Discord.

Updated on: 04/07/2021