Netlify Let's Encrypt certificate provisioning fails despite successful DNS verification — unusual CAA response

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1

Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. crt.sh | example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.

My domain is:

I ran this command:

It produced this output:

My web server is (include version):

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):

My hosting provider, if applicable, is:
Netify
I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don't know):
no
I'm using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel):
Netify

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot): not using certbot.

I’m trying to enable HTTPS for:

  • chasingshadowscomic.com
  • www.chasingshadowscomic.com

The website is hosted on Netlify at lambent-malabi-dfa9e4.netlify.app. DNS is managed by HostGator using hgns1.hostgator.com and hgns2.hostgator.com.

My DNS records are:

chasingshadowscomic.com      A       75.2.60.5
www.chasingshadowscomic.com  CNAME   lambent-malabi-dfa9e4.netlify.app.

Netlify reports “DNS verification was successful,” but provisioning fails with:

We could not provision a Let’s Encrypt certificate for your custom domain.

Netlify doesn’t show the underlying ACME error, and I don’t have access to its certificate-client logs.

Checks performed on September 14, 2026:

  • Both authoritative nameservers return the expected website records.
  • Google and Cloudflare DNS resolve both names correctly.
  • HTTP requests reach Netlify and serve the website.
  • HTTPS fails with a certificate hostname mismatch.
  • No root AAAA, restrictive CAA, or DS records were found.

One unusual result: querying either HostGator nameserver directly for www CAA records:

dig @hgns1.hostgator.com www.chasingshadowscomic.com CAA +norecurse

returns:

status: NXDOMAIN

ANSWER:
www.chasingshadowscomic.com. 14400 IN CNAME lambent-malabi-dfa9e4.netlify.app.

AUTHORITY:
netlify.app. 3600 IN SOA HGNS1.HOSTGATOR.com. root.HOSTGATOR.com. 126040501 10800 3600 604800 3600

Could this response interfere with Let’s Encrypt’s CAA checks or domain validation? What further diagnostics would distinguish a HostGator DNS problem from a Netlify provisioning issue?

2

That's really something to ask Netlify support about. They are very good I'm sure they can sort your config out.

3

Are you trying to get a cert with both names on it?

4

Yes, and they did get one earlier with both names. See: chasingshadowscomic.com CT search results | CertObserver

And, HTTP and HTTPS requests all end up at HTTPS for the apex which returns a legit page.

It's confusing to me that the apex A record points to an IP different than the CNAME resolves to which is two different IP. But, a Netlify server replies to both and redirects to HTTPS apex domain. I don't use Netlify so maybe that's a normal setup. I don't see any "provisioning" problem so not sure what Netlify is complaining about.