A custom domain is an important part of your brand as you want your audience to know who you are. Sometimes, you might want to change the default domain for your summit or use your own domain URL like summit.yourdomain.com.
When setting up your custom domain, you MUST use a subdomain. To explain why, let's look at the link breakdowns below:
To create the link to your custom domain, we use CNAME records (think of this like a pointer). However, it is not possible to create a CNAME record on an apex/root domain and thus we require the use of subdomains. You can be as creative as you want with your subdomain, though some ideas to help you get started are: summit.mydomain.com, event.mydomain.com and eventname.mydomain.com.
Tip: remember that www. is a subdomain and can be used:
N.B. This is an advanced setting and we don't recommend novices try this.
Quick start
First, you will want to set up your CNAME DNS record with your domain's DNS provider. Often, this will be the company you bought the domain name from (example: GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Netlify etc.)
Now we're going to start adding the CNAME record. Each DNS provider is slightly different, but they should have documentation on how to add a CNAME record using their platform. Before you create a new one, make sure there are no other CNAME records that already exist in your account for the subdomain you want to use.
For example, if you want to use summit.mydomain.com, you need to make sure that you've not already created a CNAME record for that path. If one already exists, you need to either delete that CNAME record, or use a different subdomain (example: summit2020.mydomain.com)
In the Name field, you can put the subdomain name you'd like to use. For example, if you want summit.yourdomain.com put in summit as the name of the CNAME record.
Then, put in 'fallback.heysummit.com' in the data field of the record - by doing so, you're telling our system that you'll be redirecting a user to HeySummit. Remember, please use 'fallback.heysummit.com' and not your existing HeySummit subdomain (i.e. use 'fallback.heysummit.com' and not your-great-event.heysummit.com).
Once that's done, you can begin the HeySummit side of the setup. Sign into your event and head to Event Setup
Select General and click on the Update button under the section EVENT DOMAIN.
You will see this screen come up:
All you need to do is fill in the box under the Custom Domain field. In our example, this would be summit.yourdomain.com, and click the Register button.
Once registered, you will then be asked to add 2 TXT records to verify ownership. Please note that it can take a few minutes (and sometimes up to a few hours) for your DNS changes to be detected. As long as you have added the CNAME and two TXT records correctly, you can close this screen. We will email you once the process has been completed.
Click Save
Try navigating to your new domain. The SSL certificate will be automatically generated by us. While your DNS might take up to a few hours to update, this change usually happens within 10 minutes.
Important Things To Note:
Once the TXT records have been generated you have up to 24 hours to add the DNS records and verify them. If later than that, the TXT records may have been regenerated, requiring you to add the newly updated ones to your DNS records.
Please note that your custom domain will only become active once your TXT records are correctly set up. You can use the nslookup.io resource to verify this.
Here's the URL to search for your own domain:The domain name you should enter into the search box should be the custom domain with `_acme-challenge`. So, if your custom domain is www.mydomain.com, you should enter `_acme-challenge.www.mydomain.com`.