Importing Hosts From Your DNS Provider

Adding hosts one at a time works fine for a domain with three records. It's tedious for a domain with thirty. If your DNS lives at one of the providers we integrate with, you can skip the typing entirely: connect the provider with a read-only API key and we'll pull the list of hostnames from your zone and start monitoring all of them.

What a provider connection does

When you connect a provider to a domain, OneDollarDNS:

1. Validates the credentials live — we fetch your zone's records during setup, so a typo'd key fails immediately instead of silently later.
2. Imports your hostnames — every record name in the zone becomes a monitored host. We skip wildcards and zone plumbing like SOA records.
3. Re-syncs daily — new hosts you create at the provider are picked up automatically. You can also trigger a sync any time with Sync now on the domain's settings page.

Two things a connection deliberately does not do:

• It never deletes hosts. If a record disappears at the provider, the host stays monitored — and your next DNS check will alert you that its records went away. That's the point of a monitoring tool: deletions should be loud, not silent. Remove hosts manually once you've confirmed a deletion was intentional.
• It doesn't copy record values. We import the names, then resolve the actual records against your authoritative nameservers, the same way every monitoring check works. What we alert on is always what the real DNS says — not what the provider's dashboard says. (For Cloudflare-proxied records these are different things, and the real DNS is the one your visitors see.)

Your API keys are encrypted at rest and only ever used to read DNS records. Keys live at the account level — connect five domains from the same DigitalOcean account and you paste the token once, pick it from a dropdown for the rest, and rotate it in one place (DNS Providers in the app) when it changes. We still recommend creating keys with the narrowest scope your provider offers — read-only, single zone where possible.

One thing to watch: connect the domain exactly as it exists at the provider. Provider APIs serve whole zones, so a subdomain you've added as its own OneDollarDNS domain (like api.example.com) can't be synced directly — connect example.com instead, and the subdomain's records come along with the zone.

Setting up each provider

The connect dialog lives on your domain page (Connect provider) and on the domain's settings page.

Cloudflare

Create an API token — not the legacy Global API Key — with the Zone / DNS / Read permission, scoped to the zone you're connecting. Cloudflare's guide: Create an API token.

DigitalOcean

Create a personal access token with read scope from the API section of the control panel. DigitalOcean's guide: How to Create a Personal Access Token.

GoDaddy

Create a production API key and secret from the GoDaddy Developer Portal. Note that GoDaddy limits API availability for some account types; if key creation isn't offered on your account, you can still import hosts with a zone file upload.

Namecheap

Namecheap's API has two extra requirements:

1. Enable API access under Profile → Tools → Namecheap API Access. Your API user is your Namecheap username.
2. Allowlist our server IP. Namecheap only accepts API requests from IP addresses you've explicitly approved. The connect dialog shows the exact IP to add. Without it, every request is rejected no matter how correct the key is.

Namecheap's guide: Intro to the Namecheap API.

Porkbun

Create an API key and secret key from your account, then — easy to miss — enable API access on the specific domain under the domain's Details panel. Porkbun's guide: Getting started with the Porkbun API.

When a sync fails

If the provider rejects our request — a revoked token, a removed allowlist entry, a zone that's no longer on the account — or requests keep failing even after retries, the connection switches to an Error state:

• You get one email explaining what failed (one, not one per day).
• The status chip on the domain page turns red.
• Automatic daily syncing pauses so we don't hammer the provider with doomed requests.

To recover: if the key is still valid (say, the failure was a temporarily missing allowlist entry), Sync now on the domain's settings page retries and reactivates the connection on success. If the key is dead, rotate it under DNS Providers in your account — we verify the new key with the provider before saving, and it reactivates every domain using it.

Disconnecting never touches your hosts — everything already imported stays monitored exactly as before. The only thing you lose is the automatic daily import of new hostnames.

What about providers we don't integrate with?

If your DNS host isn't on the list, the zone file upload accepts a standard BIND-format export, which nearly every DNS provider can produce. The result is identical to a provider import — every hostname in the file becomes a monitored host — it's just not automatic.