Issue pointing JATOS DigitalOcean Droplet server to NameCheap domain
Hello!
I am a researcher currently trying to conduct a series of online experiments with JATOS in psychology. Due to the pandemic, my access to participants has been halted, as people can't come to my lab at the university. So I had to transfer my work online. With minimal programming experience, this has been a very demanding task (obviously).
I chose JATOS to bring my studies in the online environment, and they strongly recommended using a cloud-based server, specifically DigitalOcean. Due to severe lack of time, I just blindly followed the instructions they gave out here: http://www.jatos.org/JATOS-on-DigitalOcean.html
In order to be able to add encryption with Traefik, I purchased a domain name on NameCheap, psy-research.xyz, and tried to direct the Droplet there, according to the instructions found here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-point-to-digitalocean-nameservers-from-common-domain-registrars.
NameCheap told me it would take up to 48 hours to activate - and 50 hours later, it did not.
I am very concerned that I did something wrong in my setup, or that I did not do everything I was supposed to do. My time is very very limited - on Saturday morning, I have to send links to my participants. I would immensely appreciate any help or feedback on whether I did everything right. I will sum up my actions below and add pictures to illustrate:
In the section - Create New Record -, I only filled in the A part, where I copy-pasted what I think is the IP of my droplet 159.65.93.60. For hostname, I wrote @, although I'm not sure that's right. Should I have filled in any info in the other categories (e.g. AAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV etc.)?
In my NameCheap account, I wrote the 3 nameservers (ns1.digitalocean.com, ns2..., ns3...), and checked the green option. That's all I did there.
I do realize my question is most likely silly. I'm in a strange situation, where I need to abide by a very strict timeline with my research, and it is very important that this works, because it's too late to try out anything else. I would normally read up on this stuff myself, but I don't have the time.
Any feedback or help would be immensely appreciated!!
PS: If I happened to share private information above, could anybody be so kind as to let me know? :)) I crammed Python, JavaScript and JATOS basic notions in under a month - everything is messed up in my mind right now :))
Comments
Hi,
DNS settings can be annoying. First they do not work whatever you do - and then suddenly they do and you don't even know what of those many things you tried out was the one that helped because it takes so long for them to propagate through the internet.
Since you want to start your experiment tomorrow and therefore your time is limited I'd offer the following: I can give you a subdomain from 'jatos.org' (for free) and setup the A record in my name registrar. I just need your IP. I just tried the one you gave here (159.65.93.60) but there doesn't seem to be a JATOS right now.
Best,
Kristian
According to your domain registrar, create a new CNAME and wait for it to get propagated.
You can easily point the DigitalOcean domains on managed hosting, I was getting this error on cpanel but when I moved to managed hosting you I have done it through their managed platform, You can check this guide to get is resolved: https://www.cloudways.com/blog/host-wordpress-on-digitalocean/