Custom domains
Three ways to serve your public site.
1. Your community subdomain
Free and immediate. Your branding slug decides it:
demohoa serves demohoa.civicport.io. Nothing to configure.
2. Buy a domain through CivicPort
Search for an available domain from the public site settings and register it. Pricing is cost-plus, shown to the cent, with the renewal price shown alongside. It is paid from your community's credits.
Your community is the registrant
You provide the registrant details, and they are used for all three registration contacts. Your community is the named owner of the domain, not CivicPort.
The registrant email carries a real obligation:
- ICANN verifies it once, and suspends the domain until the link is clicked.
- Renewal notices go to the same address.
Use a shared inbox somebody still reads in three years, not a board member's personal address.
Auto-renew
On by default and worth leaving on. A lapsed domain takes your public website down and can be registered by somebody else.
Status while it sets up
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Purchasing | The registration is being placed |
| Registered | Registered, still wiring up |
| Provisioning CDN | Certificate and distribution being set up |
| Live | Serving |
| Purchase failed | It did not complete. The page carries the reason |
| Expiring | Renewal due |
| Expired | No longer registered |
You may also see a note that the registry is still verifying the registration. That is normal and clears itself.
3. Connect a domain you already own
Keep your domain at your existing registrar and point it here. Two steps, and the page gives you the exact records.
- Prove ownership. Create one TXT record at your DNS provider. Status is
pending verificationuntil it resolves. - Point the domain. Create the records the page lists. Status is
waiting DNSuntil they resolve, thenlive.
Records are shown as host, type and value. Copy them exactly, including any trailing dot your provider requires.
DNS changes take anywhere from minutes to a day to propagate. The page rechecks as you reload it, so there is nothing to resubmit.
An external domain renews at its own registrar. Auto-renew and renewal pricing here do not apply to it, and CivicPort will not renew it for you.
www and the apex
Both the apex and www are handled for a domain bought through CivicPort. For a
connected domain, create the records the page lists for each hostname you want to
serve.
Sign-in on a custom domain
Sign-in links send visitors back to the platform domain. Sessions are scoped there, so a sign-in completed on your custom domain would produce a session the portal cannot see.