Digital Ocean Discourse install with Hostgator site

Installation
1

Hi, I’m trying to get my forum running using a domain purchased through Hover and utilized through HostGator. Installing and running as HTTP works fine, just created DNS A record and pointed to droplet IP, but I need to secure the site and I’m running into snafus. I have a comodo wildcard ssl certificate installed at hostgator.
HostGator support advice ranged from nonsensical to “I’m trying to play pong over here.”

I had the setup running similarly in the spring with a different domain, and the forum hosted on a subdomain, but for this site, I want the forum running at the domain and the blogs and other features to be housed at various subdomains.

The error I’m getting is a “Site Can’t Be Reached - Connection Refused,” but the SSL template and ports are appropriately unblocked on the Discourse side, and when I remove the A record for the droplet IP, the SSL works fine for the remaining publichtml content.

Please help - I have clearly lucked my way through this in a past; I know nothing relative to the community on how to do this.

Thanks

2

I don’t quite understand your setup here.

Ideally You’d continue to host Your site on
example.com & www.example.com

And host the forum on something like
forum.example.com

Letting website and forum manage their SSL on their own. This is the very standard kind of setup and should work.

If You could explain specifically what is failing then you may be able to get some help here.

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3

I want to host the forum at example.com and the rest of the site at blog.example.com or inquiries.example.com
all the subdomains would rest at hostgator,
the root would host discourse via digital ocean
when using http, the setup worked fine. moving to https, connection was refused.

If my thinking for the setup is in error, that’s fine, just need to know so that I can reallocate my focus where it needs to be.

I appreciate your help - does this clarify my situation?

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4

Yes very much.

First thing You’d want to do is to get your forum up & running.

For that I’ll recommend removing all the DNS records except the ones for digital ocean and making your forum work first …

Then from there, you may start adding subdomains to your hosting and creating relevant cname or a records.

I’d also recommend using a 3rd party DNS to make sure your hosting DNS is not overriding your records.

5

If your DNS is right, I’d rename your app.yml and run discourse-setup. Don’t fool with the comodo CERT’s.

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