Hi Vercel team/community,
I’m on the Hobby plan and have been stuck in a DNS delegation loop for over 60 hours with my domain remove-background.tech. The site (project: remove-background-tech-v2) works perfectly on the vercel.app subdomain, but the apex/root domain shows “Invalid Configuration” in Project Settings > Domains, and propagation is frozen at ~10-15% global (only 2-3 greens in the dashboard map).
What I’ve Done:
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Delegated NS at Namecheap (registrar) to ns1.vercel-dns.com / ns2.vercel-dns.com >60 hours ago.
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Confirmed via whois remove-background.tech: Only the two Vercel NS listed, no extras.
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DNSSEC was OFF before the switch—no DS records in the .tech registry (verified at dnssec-analyzer.verisignlabs.com/remove-background.tech: “No DS records found”).
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Domain added to the project correctly (subdomain valid/green).
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Propagation checkers: dnschecker.org/#NS/remove-background.tech (~10-15% green) and whatsmydns.net/#NS/remove-background.tech.
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Verisign analyzer shows REFUSED from both Vercel NS on DNSKEY queries (expected without zone creation).
The Loop:
Vercel’s NS return REFUSED because the zone isn’t created → resolvers can’t get records → propagation doesn’t advance → zone auto-creation threshold (80-90%) never hits. Your AI support confirmed this and suggested a manual zone creation, but the ticket form requires Pro.
Expected: Manual zone creation/population (A/AAAA to 76.76.21.21 / 2606:4700:20::681a:1525, CNAME for www) to break the loop and get the site live globally. Happy to provide more logs if needed.
Thanks—downtime is killing traffic. Any Hobby users fixed this?