Customize domain DNS records
Meredith Owens
Develop the functionality to allow users to customize their domain’s DNS records.
Currently, our interface does not support adding custom DNS records. At the scale of communities we manage, it's not feasible for our product team to add/edit/remove DNS records manually.
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Steve Crooks
After doing some exchanges back and forth about email aliases, I think the real problem that this feature request addresses is that HOA Express holds our very valuable and important domain hostage -- it can ONLY be used for HOA Express. This makes it impossible to manage our own email, or to create third-level domains that point to other services. I find this a big limitation, and clearly some other people do also.
Maybe Evin, who seems very technically familiar with Cloudflare, is worth having a conversation with, to see if maybe there's a way you didn't know about to change some things to make it possible to manage our own domains and simply point the necessary pieces to HOA Express?
The other solution is to do what registrars provide, and give us a way to customize our domains within HOA Express. That would work, and I think is what this feature request is for. It's just more of a pain than working out how to do it in the opposite direction, because many of us manage more than one domain and then we'd have to do it in multiple places.
In any case, _some_ way to customize things would be awesome.
Evin Callahan
To be clear, my merged in request is NOT the same as this request.
My request is about NOT giving NS control over an entire domain to hoa-express, rather than this request which seems like is more enabling users to control DNS records THROUGH hoa-express (Similar to your email functionality)
Steve Crooks
I absolutely would love what's expressed by Evin below. Let me designate HOA Express as a CNAME so I can manage my email and other things in other ways. I would like my domain name to be available for use with other services again. This is one of the most painful points for using HOA Express, and it's very atypical in my experience, where almost everyone just needs me to set a CNAME or A record.
Meredith Owens
Steve Crooks: I'm afraid there isn't a way to use our service by simply adding a CNAME or A record for several reasons. We manage all communities’ nameservers and DNS records while they have a website with us. This is required because our nameservers are much more than a simple set of DNS records; rather, our nameservers provide a wealth of sophisticated technology, rules, and settings that allow our entire platform to function.
However, this feature request would be a technically feasible solution to the pain point mentioned by Evin in the merged post!
Evin Callahan
Meredith Owens: Technically what you're saying is not incompatible with what I'm suggesting. If you want to go into more detail I'm happy to discuss with you but these things are not mutually exclusive.
Afaict - you use cloudflare, which provides a lot of your WAF functionality and CDN functionality which I presume you're referring to. These can still be enabled by an owners domain adding CDN subdomains their domain as required by your system in order to supply the CDN, and will still go through cloudflare to get the WAF functionality.
Wes Cossick
Evin Callahan: I work closely with our engineering team, and I can confirm that what Meredith Owens is saying is correct. Cloudflare is an integral part of our tech stack, providing an array of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS tools and technologies that we leverage to power community websites. For this reason, it would not be possible for customers to simply add a DNS record or two and still use our platform.
Further, we iterate rapidly and frequently tweak, improve, and expand the configuration of customer domains through Cloudflare to optimize our platform and utilize the latest technologies. If customers were required to manually apply these changes, it would require continual and substantial effort.
The feature request Meredith outlined above would address your underlying desire, though (the ability to manage custom DNS records).
Evin Callahan
Wes Cossick: Can you elaborate on what specifically you have in place with cloudflare that is incompatible with pointing a cname at your services?
Steve Crooks
Meredith Owens: Giving us the ability to customize the DNS records would probably be good enough for me. What I'd really like right now is the ability to use different mail servers (primarily because I want to be able to create a good number of true email aliases with no mail accounts behind them). I could easily see in the future making use of three level domains also, to point to some specialized web services.
Wes Cossick
Evin Callahan: We employ a large number of Cloudflare's technologies and services. I cannot get into the details, but I would encourage you to review their "What is Cloudflare?" page and review their many products to see the types of technologies they offer.
Evin Callahan
Wes Cossick: I’m very familiar wi to cloudflare that’s why i’m suggesting that there are options to enable both using cloudflare, and letting firms own their domains
Meredith Owens
Steve Crooks: Thank you for sharing this! We are open to considering supporting email aliases in the future. We've created a new feature request post for that and have added your vote. That way, you're notified when we update its status.
You can view that post here: https://feedback.hoa-express.com/feature-requests/p/email-aliases.
Meredith Owens
Merged in a post:
Customize DNS records when a domain is set up on HOA Express
Evin Callahan
Currently, the way things are implemented after chatting with the support team is that an entire root domain is required to be delegated (ie DNS records) to HOA Express, which in turn prevents domain owners from setting up any other DNS records under that domain.
This prevents domain owners from setting up stuff like mail services outside of HOA Express adding subdomains pointing outside of HOA Express, and many many other use cases.
This request is to allow for some other approach to serving the website via only a CNAME or A record addition, which leaves control in the domain owners hands, and also enables users to assign a subdomain to point to HOA-express which is a commonly configured use case in other places on the internet.