Getting dannysbentley.tech onto Vercel (DNS lessons)

A short postmortem on why the domain did not resolve at first and how updating nameservers fixed it.

Today I tried to point dannysbentley.tech to Vercel and hit a DNS wall.

What happened

The project deployed correctly, but the custom domain would not verify and traffic never reached Vercel. Records looked right at a glance, but propagation checks kept showing stale DNS authority.

What we learned

The issue was not the individual A/CNAME records. The domain was still delegated to old nameservers, so Vercel never became the source of truth for DNS.

Final fix

I updated the registrar to use Vercel nameservers, waited for delegation to propagate, and then re-ran verification in Vercel. Once nameserver delegation switched over, the domain resolved and SSL provisioning completed.

Takeaways

Check nameserver delegation first, before tweaking individual DNS records.
If verification fails repeatedly, confirm who is authoritative for the zone.
Plan a short propagation window into deployment timelines.