a month ago
Hi Railway team,
I need urgent help with a custom domain that's stuck on "Validating
domain ownership" for over 4 hours on my production migration.
Details:
- Plan: Hobby (recently upgraded)
- Service: Stactory-Ops (production environment)
- Custom domain: ops.stactory.com
- Generated CNAME target: gizkl67r.up.railway.app
What I've verified:
- DNS is fully propagated globally (confirmed via dnschecker.org
from 20+ locations worldwide)
- CNAME record matches exactly what Railway requested
- TXT validation record (_railway-verify.ops) is present with
the exact value Railway generated
- No CAA records on the apex domain (Let's Encrypt not blocked)
- No AAAA records or conflicting records for the ops subdomain
- No duplicate CNAME or A records for the same hostname
Context:
- Originally I added the domain while on trial, validation got stuck.
- I deleted and re-added the domain (Railway generated a new CNAME
target), updated DNS in my registrar, DNS propagated globally
within ~30 min.
- I then upgraded to Hobby plan, hoping it would unblock. It didn't.
- The status is still "Validating domain ownership" and the domain
returns no response.
This is blocking a production migration from another platform. My
team is currently unable to use the app. Can someone from the team
please manually trigger the validation or look at what's blocking
it on Railway's side?
Happy to provide project/service IDs privately if needed.
Thanks in advance.
Pinned Solution
a month ago
I'd try removing your domain from Railway and your DNS provider, waiting for ~10-15 mins, then re-add them back.
3 Replies
Status changed to Open Railway • about 1 month ago
a month ago
If your DNS provider is Cloudflare (or any other similar service), ensure the CNAME record is set to DNS Only (grey cloud), not Proxied (orange cloud).
darseen
If your DNS provider is Cloudflare (or any other similar service), ensure the CNAME record is set to **DNS Only (grey cloud), not Proxied (orange cloud).**
a month ago
Thanks for the suggestion, but my DNS provider is HostGator
(cPanel Zone Editor), not Cloudflare. HostGator doesn't have
a proxying feature — all records are served directly as-is.
I verified with dig from multiple public resolvers (8.8.8.8,
1.1.1.1) that the CNAME resolves correctly to gizkl67r.up.railway.app
and ultimately to Railway's Fastly IPs (151.101.x.x), with no
proxy in between.
Still stuck on "Validating domain ownership". Could a Railway
staff member take a look?
a month ago
I'd try removing your domain from Railway and your DNS provider, waiting for ~10-15 mins, then re-add them back.
Status changed to Solved 0x5b62656e5d • 5 days ago