Hi Tom and sorry to hear about the struggle!
Glad to see that Luke got your issue fixed and informed you in the helpdesk that he had done so less than 9 hours after you first contacted us on the topic. That’s rather faster than we are usually able to help free customers, so you’re welcome :). You should consider upgrading to a paid account if fast support turnaround is important to you. We are happy to provide our service and tech support for free, but we cannot promise fast responses for free customers.
On to the issue at hand:
We know our automated DNS records aren’t always perfect - we try to be “automagic” and it’s one-size-fits-most. Let’s break down how those are created for your and others’ future reference.
NETLIFY records are actually linked A records from our DNS provider, NS1 (cf their documentation), and we create those ONLY in DNS Zones we manage, and ONLY when you apply a hostname to a site. Don’t want a NETLIFY record for a hostname? Do not apply it to a Netlify site.
In cases where there is an undesired NETLIFY or NETLIFYv6 record, you will need our help to remove them at present, though we have an open feature request to allow self-deletion so perhaps that will change. In most cases, deleting those records would bring down your website, so that’s why we have it locked off right now. We also set them to non-obvious values to enable our CDN and moreover make sure you are on the correct CDN for your account level (The Enterprise CDN has slightly different DNS records).
When do we automatically create a record?
- you apply the name as a custom domain or domain alias to a site AFTER activating our DNS hosting. We do not retroactively create these records for you if you enable our DNS hosting after configuring a site with one or more hostnames.
- you activate a branch subdomain by selecting a branch from the settings card in our domain settings for a site.
Of course these records only matter in case your DNS Zone is both configured at Netlify to be managed by us AND configured at your registrar to point to us.