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Connecting your domain

In this document, you'll find the details about connecting your own custom domain to your website.

Synaps Media

Synaps Media

— 3 min read

When you create a new website in Synaps Media you get a free subdomain to start serving your website, like yourname.synaps.media. To use your own domain instead (like yourname.com), you need to connect this domain to your site.

Connecting domain to your site

  1. Go to panel.synaps.media and pick the website you want to connect a domain.
  2. Select "Connect new domain" below the domain list.
  3. Write the domain you want to connect, like yourdomain.com.
  4. If you want to use this domain as your main address, then pick "Use this as main domain". If you don't select it, that will mean this domain will be redirected to your main domain.
  5. Click "Save".
  6. After a successful addition you'll see the domain configuration instructions.
  7. Once you finish the redirection, your new domain will be active.

Choosing the best option

To connect your domain to your Synaps Media website, you have several options. Each option gives opportunities for different needs.

NS Configuration

Connecting your domain by linking NS (Nameserver) addresses to Synaps Media is the preferred and easiest way for most people. By pointing NS address to Synaps Media, you'll set Synaps Media as the DNS manager, so we'll able to automatically manage needed DNS records for you with the best configuration.

To change your domain NS records, you need to go to admin panel of your domain provider. After picking your domain, you can see where to set your NS records. It can be named as "Nameservers" or "NS Records". Most of the time you'll see a default list of NS addresses from your domain provider. Remove them, add the addresses provided below and save the list.

headline.synaps.media
cover.synaps.media

Please keep in mind, updating NS records can take some time, up to 24 hours. Once update is done, you domain will start working with your Synaps Media site.

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Attention: If you have other websites served from this domain, or an email service running on this domain, you'll need to move those records to our DNS server as well. DNS management on Synaps Media panel will be provided soon. Until then please use DNS configuration instead of NS Configuration.

DNS Configuration

DNS (Domain Name System) records are used to connect domains to website servers.

To change your domain NS records, you need to go to admin panel of your domain provider. After picking your domain, you can see where to set your DNS records.

There different type of DNS Records. Most commons are "A" Records and "CNAME" records. A records are used for pointing a domain to an IP address. CNAME records res used for pointing a domain to another domain.

Pointing Your Main Domain

For having best possible performance that Synaps Media provides, you need to connect your "main" domain to given Synaps Media domain with a CNAME record. If you'll use a domain like www.yoursite.com and if your Synaps Media domain is yourname.synaps.media, you need to add a CNAME record of "www" to "yourname.synaps.media"

CNAME www => yourname.synaps.media

Pointing Root domain

If you want to use your root domain(eg. yourdomain.com) for your website instead of a subdomain (like www.yourdomain.com) then using CNAME record could be not possible for you, depending to your DNS server provider.

As of DNS standards, a root domain should always point an IP address. But as the nature of CDN, target IP address for your website should be dynamically set according to location of your visitors. That way, our CDN will respond your visitors by the closest server to their location. But if you put a static IP address as your DNS record, they you'll miss that opportunity.

Some DNS providers (like Cloudflare) solve this issue by resolving IP address of given CNAME record on their server while a DNS query happens, and it returns a dynamic IP request according to visitor (named CNAME Flattening). Even this is not ideal, because in this case you rely on Cloudflare's edge locaiton diversity for the performance of our CDN.

If you want to use your root domain, we suggest to use Synaps Media nameservers for your domain, since we automatically handle this issue as well. Otherwise you may consider to use a DNS service that supports CNAME flattening or using a subdomain (like www) instead.

Pointing Your Redirect Domain

For a website Synaps.Media, you can only have 1 main domain. Other domains that you add will be redirected to your main domain. This is a common best practice to avoid duplicate content and a poor SEO.

Connecting a redirect domain is basically same with connecting main domain. A CNAME record to your synaps.media subdomain will be enough.