Setting Up Your Custom Domain

Creating a custom domain for your community is easier than ever!

Note: If you are a GoDaddy customer and you are new to managing your domain's CNAME records, please visit this GoDaddy Help page.

These are the steps that you'll follow to add your Custom Domain to Honeycommb: 

Step 1: Add the Custom Domain Add-On

Login to your community using your Community Leader/Admin account and access the Custom Domains section of Control Center.
Note: The Community Leader account is the account we automatically created for you when your community was first started.

1. 1. Open the slide-out menu in your community and click the Control Center menu link. This will open Control Center 2.0.
   2. Click the tab button in the top right of your screen, this will open up the slide-out menu of your Control Center.
   3. Click Community Settings in your slide-out menu and click Custom Domains
   4. Click Explore Custom Domain Addons to open the add-on selection menu
   5. Add the Custom Domains add-on and complete checkout.

Step 2: Finalize Your Full Domain

For the first step, you simply need to figure out what full domain you'd like to use for the web app in your community. The full domain means that you'll include the subdomain. Some inspiration to get you going:

club.domain.com

community.domain.com

app.domain.com

network.domain.com 

www.domain.com

Note: If you want your community to be on a primary domain (ex: domain.com), you MUST add "www." before the domain address. If you would like have your domain without WWW accessible, you will need to add a Forward in your domain's DNS settings that forwards the 'naked' domain (ex: domain.com) to your www address (ex: www.domain.com)

Step 3: Add your Custom Domain to Control Center and receive your DNS Settings

Navigate back to the Custom Domains section of your Control Center and add the custom domain, then click Save.



DNS Settings: After saving, the page will refresh and display the DNS updates that you will need to add to your domain's DNS Settings. Click copy to copy the points-to address to your clipboard.

Step 4: Update Your DNS

Navigate to the Domain Registrar/company you purchased your domain from and add a new record. The formatting is going to be: 

TYPE: CNAME

HOST: www

POINTS TO: crazy-alligator-12938734.heroku.com (example)

Pending > Active

It can take as little as 30 minutes or sometimes up to as long as 24 hours or more for your new DNS settings to propagate to your new custom domain and become active. Our service checks to see if your new custom domain is active every 5 minutes until the status turns to active.

 

Step 5: Designate your new Domain as the "Primary Domain" for your Community

Your "Primary Domain" is the domain name (ex. www.mydomain.com) that appears in your visitors browser's address field. By default, your Honeycommb subdomain is set as the primary domain (your-network.honeycommb.com).

Once a custom domain is "Active" you can make it primary by clicking the "Make Primary Domain" link associated to the domain.