I recently jumped into Netlify-hosted from other server. This article is about how to use Google Domains with Netlify (and why GitLab pages with custom domain is bad).

First of all, Options of hosting service I had in mind were:

• Firebase
• GitLab pages
• Netlify

Firebase seemed good for dynamic site, but this site is powered by Zola (a fantastic static site generator) so, well, I don’t use it for now.

Next, GitLab pages. OK I use GitLab for my main repository-hosting service, and it’s been great. So I thought GitLab pages with custom domain was natural and might be easy.

It was not. Using custom domain in GitLab pages is hard. I do not recommend this setup.

Why?

Because its document is broken.

In official tutorial, they say “set the A record to foo, and TXT record to bar.” But in the settings page of custom domain, I’m told to set CNAME and TXT. What’s going on?

Actually I tried both. Neither did work. Though time might solve this (due to TTL? Note that I’ve waited for 1 day), I felt like, OK this is enough.

resource records for Netlify

So, I went to Netlify, which I’ve used as an example site for my Zola theme. In DNS >> resource records set as following and, voila, it’s done:

Netlify automatically set the TLS certificate with Let’s Encrypt a few minutes after check for DNS configuration. This was a good experience, so I highly recommend Netlify over GitLab pages, at least for now.