I switched my domain to Google Domains, but can't use their email service and still use Netlify DNS

I switched my Domain hosting to Google in order to use their email forwarding services, but I still want to use Netlify for the CD/CI features and linking straight to a github repo for that. However I can’t use the Google Email features without using google DNS. Is there a way to get the best of both worlds?

hi @joshbangle, you don’t have to use Netlify DNS in order to use the rest of our features! You can totally use a different DNS service for that.

You do need to make sure that the domain is completely transferred, though -if more than one DNS thinks it is handling traffic for your domain, things get very wonky.

Where did you go through the process of registering your domain?

If netlify was the DNS for the domain at some point, this may be helpful:

Thanks for the response!

I originally purchased the domain through Netlify and Name.com (i believe is what it is called), and a few weeks ago transferred the domain to Google Domains.

So I’m confused by all of these resources, because most of them talk about pointing your name servers to the Netlify name servers. I’m hoping to not have to use the “Custom Name Servers” option with Google Domains because this doesn’t allow email forwarding through the google services. I’m trying to find a way to use Google Name Servers, but still have the website itself deployed through Netlify to take advantage of the Continuous Deployment features with linking Netlify to my Github.

These articles confuse me with this, as most seem to go back to using the DNS provided by netlify, and putting that into the Google Domains Custom Domain settings. I’m hoping this makes sense, I’m not sure how to explain it better honestly.

Hi, @joshbangle, using Netlify DNS is not a requirement to host sites on our service. Netlify NDS is one of two ways. The other is “external DNS”.

It sounds like you would prefer the external DNS method and those instructions can be found at the link below:

If you have any questions about how to create the DNS records (at Google) to make the external DNS method work, please let us know.

Ok awesome. I went to my Google Domain, switched it back to the Google Name Servers, and then set up 2 CNAME records, one with joshbangle.com as the host, pointing to my netlify subdomain for my website, and another with www.joshbangle.com as the host doing the same. So far my site can’t be reached, but I’m hoping that is just because it is taking time to go into effect. However I’m concerned I’m not doing things correctly because the directions for Apex domain vs Sub domain are slightly confusing.

Do I need to delete the domain and subdomain records I already have active for the website in my Netlify account from before?

Ok, I believe I got it working. I set an A record with just @ as the host to point to the netlify load balancer IP address (104.198.14.52) and I set a CNAME record with ONLY www as the host to point to the netlify subdomain for my website. Now both www.joshbangle.com and joshbangle.com direct to my website as expected, and I’m free to host it with Netlify’s awesome CD/CI and ALSO take advantage of googles email services! Thanks for the link, that was exactly what I needed, just needed to really read it hard and focus on it for a bit!

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Hi, @joshbangle, thanks for letting us know it is working now. One other think I wanted to mention is that the DNS zone at Netlify should be deleted here:

https://app.netlify.com/account/dns/joshbangle.com

There is more about why in this support guide:

If there are other questions about this please reply here anytime and, for unrelated issues, new topics are also always welcome. :+1:

Incredibly helpful! I had the exact same issue and this solution worked perfectly for me.

Is there any specific advantage in using Netlify DNS?

Please don’t post the same question on multiple threads @vishisht. See response here.

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