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Adding custom domains to your site

You can use the following steps to associate custom domain names with your websites and site collections hosted on Acquia Cloud Site Factory:

  1. Purchase a second-level domain name for your website or site collection.
  2. Point your new domain name to your hosted website.
  3. Verify your CNAME record (if used).
  4. Set up email for your domain.
  5. Reconfigure external font accounts (if used) and complete the process.

If you have more than one custom domain name you want to add to your hosted website or site collection, use these procedures for each custom domain name. Websites with custom domains count against your subscription’s maximum number of websites; for more information on checking your total number of websites with custom domains, see Managing subscription usage.

You can add custom domain names to websites and site collections before purchasing the name from your domain name registrar.

For information about the additional steps necessary to configure path-based domains, see Using path-based domain names.

Default domain names on Acquia Cloud Site Factory

Your Acquia Cloud Site Factory is provisioned with a default domain name, ending in .acsitefactory.com. This default domain name remains, even after you attach custom domain names to your websites and site collections. When developing, be aware of the following considerations for .acsitefactory.com domains:

  • Default acsitefactory.com domains can’t use SSL, because you can only add SSL certificates to custom domains.
  • .htaccess directives must take default domains into account.
  • Default *.acsitefactory.com domains are excluded from search engine indexing.
  • Websites managed as part of a stack share the same subdomain pattern, such as *.customer.acsitefactory.com. For more information about stack naming, see Getting started with stacks.

For information about default domain names on Acquia Cloud subscriptions, see Limitations on default domain names.

Getting your custom domain

If you haven’t already done so, purchase a second-level domain name for your website or site collection (for example, example.com).

You can buy a domain name from a domain name registrar, a company or organization managing and selling domain names under the supervision of ICANN. Domain name registrars control how domain names are managed on DNS (Domain Name System) servers. DNS translates machine-readable computer addresses, such as 184.73.171.26, to memorable addresses, such as www.example.com.

Acquia is not a domain name registrar and does not provide DNS services. The ICANN website maintains a list of ICANN-accredited registrars.

Domain name registrar recommendations

Select a domain name registrar based on the following recommendations to provide the best experience with Acquia Cloud Site Factory to you and your website visitors.

  • Choose a domain name registrar that supports using CNAME records for domain names.

    (A CNAME record tells DNS the domain name site visitors enter in their browsers is an alias of another domain name—in your case, your Acquia Cloud Site Factory-hosted website.)

  • Ensure the domain name registrar you choose offers DNS services.

  • Some domain name registrars use objects called iframes to redirect site visitors to existing websites when using the new domain name. Since iframes block several Acquia Cloud Site Factory functions from use (including the ThemeBuilder), you cannot use the iframe redirect method for your new domain name. We recommend you use CNAME records or A Records for your domain names.

How do I determine if my registrar is using iframes for my website?

Access your website at the new domain URL provided by your registrar, and then view the HTML page source in your browser.

If the page source contains frame-related tags, as in the following example, your registrar uses iframes for your website:

<!-- frames -->
<frameset rows="50%,75" border="0" framespacing="0">
<frame name="destframe" src="http://[site URL]" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="auto" frameborder="0">
<frame src="http://example.registrar.com/us?example.com" name="bottom" frameborder="0" scrolling="NO" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" noresize>
</frameset><noframes></noframes>

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