topic Re: Setting up subdomain hosted at Route53 for Email Sending + Primary Marketing Email domain in Blog, Website & Page Publishing

Setting up subdomain hosted at Route53 for Email Sending + Primary Marketing Email domain

sip49 — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 05:34:50 GMT

I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong here, but I'm trying to setup a subdomain (hello.company.com) as my domain for everything in Hubspot (Marketing Professional plan).

I am able to follow the instructions for setting up a subdomain, so it gets me to the stage to enter a cname record for hello.company.com. However, my DNS provider (AWS Route53) doesn't like it. It keeps giving me the following error:

"Bad request. (InvalidChangeBatch 400: RRSet of type CNAME with DNS name hello.company.com. is not permitted at apex in zone hello.company.com.)

When I google online people say it's against DNS rules to have a CNAME record where you have any other records as well (e.g. we have MX records so we can receive email there). How do folks get this to work? Sounds like a pretty standard use case.

They do offer A names but it says you can only use those for a primary domain and not a subdomain. What other alternatives are there?

Re: Setting up subdomain hosted at Route53 for Email Sending + Primary Marketing Email domain

BérangèreL — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:23:46 GMT

Hi @sip49,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community!

First, I'd like to share this article that might be of interest "Troubleshoot your domain connection".
I also wanted to refer you to this related thread with helpful troubleshooting steps for connecting your domain.

I also would like to ask some of our Community Members and our Top Experts on this subject:

Hi @rlopez, @stefen, @IAmerigo, @itsme_mariog, @danmoyle, @JenBergren and @BukunmiOdetayo do you have tips to help @sip49, please?

Also, if anybody else has anything to add and/or share, please feel free to join in the conversation 🙂

Thanks a lot ❤️ and have a lovely day!

Best,
Bérangère

Re: Setting up subdomain hosted at Route53 for Email Sending + Primary Marketing Email domain

TomM2 — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:26:08 GMT

Hey @sip49 this seems to be an AWS specific issue from what I can see, I have seen this setup multiple times in the past.
Have you contacted amazon/route53 specifically regarding their suggestions for this? If it can't be set up there there's not really anything HubSpot could do to override this.

The only workaround really would be to use a different domain name to point to HubSpot. For example you could have "hello." as your MX record and "info." as your HS record, or whatever you would like to call it.

Re: Setting up subdomain hosted at Route53 for Email Sending + Primary Marketing Email domain

danmoyle — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 15:58:37 GMT

One note to consider here @sip49 - if you're setting up an email sending domain, you don't need a subdomain as you've described.

A subdomain will be how you host landing pages built in HubSpot, a blog if you'd like, an online versions of your emails (like a newsletter archive). But you email sending domain, which Google and Yahoo are geting strict on now, is different: Connect your email sending domain.

Re: Setting up subdomain hosted at Route53 for Email Sending + Primary Marketing Email domain

sip49 — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 16:01:47 GMT

Appreciate the response! Yeah, I have reached out to AWS. Although it is an issue if you use their Route53, AWS have called out (and backed up with references) that they have implemented DNS according to the global specs and other DNS providers are breaking the spec to make this work.

Ideally Hubspot should allow A name records for subdomains as well, but for whatever reason they only allow those for primary domains (likely, exactly to cover the case above) but they don't even provide an A name record option if you put in a subdomain. 😕

I ended up just using a different name for my subdomain for these hubspot html email pages.

Re: Setting up subdomain hosted at Route53 for Email Sending + Primary Marketing Email domain

TomM2 — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 16:14:05 GMT

Thanks for following up @sip49 really good to learn more. I actually didn't even know HubSpot didn't allow a records for subdomains tbh! HubSpot allowing A records at all is a pretty new thing.

Out of curiosity, why is it a CNAME doesn't suit for your subdomain? I would have thought a CNAME was a better, more reliable solution than an a record to be honest. Even at that, you could set up a reverse proxy or something similar to push an IP to a cname.

Re: Setting up subdomain hosted at Route53 for Email Sending + Primary Marketing Email domain

sip49 — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 01:48:43 GMT

@TomM2 The issue is really what DNS specifications (and therefore AWS Route 53) allow you to configure (see: https://totaluptime.com/kb/cname-and-mx-for-the-same-host-name). Basically the DNS specifications (and the way AWS implemented it, which doesn't seem to be consistent for other DNS providers) is that if you have other records on a sub-domain (e.g. MX records to receive email like us), then you CAN'T also have a cname record. You can EITHER have a cname or MX records, so that was our issue. We want to receive/send email from mail.domain.com but ALSO use mail.domain.com as the hubspot domain for hosted emails/links/etc.

If hubspot provided the option to use A records (like they do for primary domains) or a CNAME then it'd be a non-issue, but for whatever reason for sub-domains specifically they only present a CNAME DNS record option. I suspect the reason they automatically offer an A record for primary domains, is exactly this reason in that primary domains are almost certainly used for other things beyond just hubspot hosting.