How to Point a Domain Name to Your NAT VPS

Connecting a custom domain to your VPS makes everything feel more professional — and for NAT VPS users, there's one extra step most guides skip. Here's the full picture.

The challenge with NAT VPS and domains

On a dedicated IP VPS, you point your domain's A record to your IP and traffic arrives on port 80/443. On a NAT VPS, your IP is shared — ports 80 and 443 are likely already taken by the host. Your traffic comes in on one of your assigned ports instead (say, port 10080 for HTTP).

The cleanest solution: use Cloudflare as a proxy. Cloudflare accepts traffic on standard ports 80/443, then forwards it to your server on any port you specify.

Option 1 — Cloudflare (recommended)

Step 1: Add your domain to Cloudflare (free plan). Update your domain's nameservers at your registrar to point to Cloudflare.

Step 2: In Cloudflare DNS, add an A record:

Step 3: In Cloudflare, go to Rules → Origin Rules. Create a rule that rewrites the destination port to your assigned HTTP port:

Now visitors hit yourdomain.com on port 80/443. Cloudflare proxies it to your server on your assigned port. SSL is handled by Cloudflare automatically.

Option 2 — Direct DNS (non-standard port)

If you don't want to use Cloudflare, point an A record to the host IP and have users connect on your assigned port:

This works fine for internal tools, dashboards, and services where you control who accesses them. For public websites, the non-standard port looks unprofessional.

Nginx configuration with a domain

SSL without Cloudflare

Let's Encrypt works if you have port 80 available for the ACME challenge. On a NAT VPS, you may need to use the DNS challenge instead of the HTTP challenge:

Subdomain setup

Each subdomain just needs its own A record pointing to the same host IP, and its own Nginx server { } block on a different port. With Cloudflare port rewriting, each subdomain can map to a different port on your server — letting you host multiple services under one domain.