Subdomains and custom domains

Subdomains

Choose a subdomain in the site's website settings: 3–40 lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. Once the site is published it's live at <subdomain>.qurtuba.in, usually within a minute. Nothing needs doing in DNS: the platform already answers for every name under qurtuba.in.

Custom domains

A custom domain puts the same site on the owner's domain, such as www.algazali.org.

1. Ask a platform administrator to register the domain for your site. It's added to the edge (Cloudflare) and recorded against your institution, library or store.

2. Add the DNS records they send you at your domain's DNS provider:

   Type	Name	Target
   CNAME	www (or the name you chose)	sites.qurtuba.in
   TXT	as provided	as provided (certificate validation)

3. Wait for validation. The certificate is issued automatically, typically within minutes of the records appearing.

4. The administrator marks the domain active, and the site answers on it.

Apex domains

Use www.example.org rather than bare example.org. Most DNS providers can't put a CNAME on the apex. Redirect the apex to www at your DNS provider.

How it works

Every request for a subdomain or custom domain reaches the platform's edge router. The router asks the database whether that host belongs to a published site. If it does, the site is served. If it doesn't, the request goes on to wherever that name really points, so other services on the same domain are never affected. See Hosts and routing.