To assign a subdomain to your Higher Logic site, you must first create a CNAME through your DNS provider and point the subdomain to your Higher Logic site's URL (TENANT.connectedcommunity.org). "TENANT" is a unique value and will be provided to you by Higher Logic.

Online Community CNAME & 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).

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

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

2. Upon saving, the record reflects on the DNS listing.

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

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

5. On the resulting 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.
6. Select the domain and click Set Primary to set your new domain as primary.

Now, the new domain should be used in all cases moving forward.

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 set up multiple DNS entries.

The recommended method is:

1. Create a CNAME record to point www.NEWDOMAIN.org to TENANT.connectedcommunity.org.
2. Create a 301 Permanent redirect on the root domain, forwarding the NEWDOMAIN.org site to www.NEWDOMAIN.org.

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

Note that not all DNS providers allow for the recommended method as several 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.
2. Create two "A" records to point the root domain (NEWDOMAIN.org) to the IP addresses:

• 52.6.165.57 and
• 52.70.138.19.

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.