Put your paper on your own domain

Out of the box your paper is read at your-desk.newsroomfloor.com. To read it at your own address you type the address into your desk, add one record at your registrar, and it serves; the certificate is ours to handle. Your built-in address keeps working either way, so no link ever breaks.

First, in your desk

Open Your own domain on the Admin tab and type the address under Your own address. The page decides which of the two lanes DNS allows, asks the edge for the address, and prints the one record with its real values. It then re-reads the domain each time it renders, and the floor re-reads every pending domain every five minutes on its own, so it goes live whether or not you come back.

A subdomain: one CNAME, at any registrar

For news.example.org when example.org stays wherever it is today.

1. At your DNS provider, add one CNAME from the subdomain to cname.newsroomfloor.com.
2. That is the whole step. Within minutes the page reads serving; the certificate is issued and renewed on our side. An optional second record the page offers lets the certificate renew for years with no further record from you.
3. Set the primary address to the subdomain.

A whole domain on its own

For example.org itself, with nothing in front of it. We do not take this yet, and the reason matters: a whole domain cannot be pointed with one record at most providers, and the way we used to do it was to ask you to move the domain's DNS to us. Your DNS is also where your email lives. We stopped offering it rather than hold something where our mistake would cost you your mail instead of your paper.

Use a subdomain in the meantime. Serving a whole domain from your own DNS, with one record you add and keep, is being built.

The primary address

When a paper is read at more than one address, the primary address is the one search engines treat as the original. It is not set by default, so each address is its own canonical. Once your domain serves, set it under Desk settings, General, Primary domain, so the paper does not split its ranking between two addresses.

Good to know

• A domain we already serve for you keeps serving exactly as it does today. Nothing here changes an address that is already live.
• Up to five domains per paper. A domain can belong to one paper on the floor at a time.
• Your built-in your-desk.newsroomfloor.com address keeps working. If you later ask us to redirect it to your domain, it forwards for good, because receipts, links, and share cards already point at it.
• A domain of your own is part of the Publisher plan and above.

Questions go to support@drm3.io.