Unfortunately the information @sam gave above is incorrect. I apologize for the delay but there is some difficulty with root domains, and our instructions need to be improved in this specific case.
We really don’t want hosted customers mapping to IP addresses as this is fragile and error prone if those IP addresses change in the future, and they definitely will. The specific issue is that you have requested a site at a bare domain, e.g.
This is a little bit unusual as Discourse is designed to work alongside your main website, not be the entire website by itself. That is why the homepage discourse.org tells you what Discourse is, rather than dumping you into a lot of discussion.
If you really want Discourse as your homepage – and I advise against this unless you are absolutely sure you will never, ever have any other pages on that domain, forever – then set it up as
(Because if example.com works then www.example.com also has to work in all cases…)
Where www is the CNAME record pointing to the hosting record. You can then redirect example.com to www.example.com via your DNS settings.