To assign a subdomain to your Higher Logic site, you must:

• create a CNAME (a "canonical name") through your domain name services (DNS) provider and then
• point the subdomain to your Higher Logic site's URL.

NOTE: In the examples below, TENANT represents your unique community site name and will be provided to you by Higher Logic.

The URL is:

TENANT.connectedcommunity.org

IMPORTANT: If you are a Canadian customer and the above URL does not work, replace connectedcommunity.org with onlinecommunity.ca, as in:

TENANT.onlinecommunity.ca

If you are based in Canada and are unsure about which domain to use, create a case with Higher Logic Support or consult your Higher Logic contact person.

Community CNAME and subdomain setup

After a subdomain is decided for a website, it must be set up with your DNS provider.

NOTE: Higher Logic is not a DNS provider.

To create the subdomain, go to your DNS provider (e.g., GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and Bluehost) and create a new CNAME record on the domain you want to use.

The request should point your new subdomain (subdomain.clientURL.org) to your Higher Logic site (TENANT.connectedcommunity.org or TENANT.onlinecommunity.ca).

In this example, GoDaddy.com is the DNS provider. We will set up "community" as the subdomain and imp.connectedcommunity.org is the community site.

1. Create the CNAME in GoDaddy with the subdomain (e.g., "community") in the Host field and the TENANT.connectedcommunity.org site in the Points to field. Set the lowest available TTL:

Upon saving, the record reflects on the DNS listing.

Note that in GoDaddy, "Host" is synonymous with "Name":

2. Navigate to your Higher Logic site and log in as a Super Admin.
3. Access the Admin interface and navigate to Pages > Sites > Domain Settings.

4. On the Domain Settings page, you should see the newly created URL of your site. In this case, we created a subdomain on higherlogic.com for our community site, community.higherlogic.com.
5. Select the domain and click Set Primary to set your new domain as primary.

The new domain will be used in future.

NOTE: The propagation of the site may appear within minutes for some users, but could take up to 48 hours to propagate entirely, and it may take several days for the site to propagate internationally.

Domain setup (hosting a Primary domain)

If you want to host a site on Higher Logic that is not a subdomain, you must:

• make are that the domain has a valid certificate before setting it as the primary domain and
• set up multiple DNS entries.

The recommended method is:

1. Create a CNAME record to point www.NEWDOMAIN.org to:

• TENANT.connectedcommunity.org (US)
• TENANT.onlinecommunity.ca (Canada)

2. Create a 301 Permanent redirect on the root domain, forwarding the NEWDOMAIN.org site to www.NEWDOMAIN.org.

This method is recommended because it allows for optimal SEO rank, link uniformity, HTTPS compliance, and it uses a load-balancer rather than pointing directly to an IP address.

Not all DNS providers allow for the above recommended method because some do not support 301 domain forwarding to a subdomain. If this is the case, the recommended method is:

1. Create a CNAME record to point www.NEWDOMAIN.org to:

• TENANT.connectedcommunity.org (US)
• TENANT.onlinecommunity.ca (Canada)

2. Create "A" records to point the root domain (NEWDOMAIN.org) to the IP addresses:

• 34.225.242.50 and 34.193.4.92 (US; TENANT.connectedcommunity.org)
• 52.60.173.175 (Canada; TENANT.onlinecommunity.ca).

NOTE: The propagation of the site may appear within minutes for some users, but will take up to 48 hours to propagate across the United States. Additionally, it may take several days for the site to propagate internationally.

Related articles

• Learn how to manage your Manage Domains, Certificates, and Redirects
• Set Up HTTPS / SSL