Custom domains (Pro)

Pro feature. Point your own domain — say jane-smith.com or chimplab.org — at your FacultyDex site. We provision an SSL certificate automatically and serve your site over HTTPS at the new address.

Before you start

• You need to own the domain. Buy it from any registrar (Cloudflare Registrar, Namecheap, Porkbun — all fine).
• You need access to the domain's DNS settings. If a colleague set up the domain for you, get them to add the records, or have them transfer DNS to you.
• The domain has to be either a root (jane-smith.com) or a subdomain (www.jane-smith.com, about.mylab.edu). FacultyDex supports both.

Setting it up

1. From the dashboard, open Site → Custom domain. Web only — this isn't in the iOS app.
2. Enter your domain (e.g. jane-smith.com or www.jane-smith.com) and click Add.
3. We'll show you exactly which DNS records to add at your registrar. There are usually two: a CNAME (or A record for root domains) plus a verification TXT record.
4. Add the records at your registrar's DNS panel. Save.
5. Back in FacultyDex, click Verify. We re-check DNS and provision SSL — usually within a minute, sometimes up to an hour for slow registrars.
6. Once verified, your site is live at the new domain. Your facultydex.org subdomain keeps working too.

Common pitfalls

• Cloudflare proxy on top of CNAME — if your DNS is on Cloudflare, set the CNAME to DNS only (gray cloud), not Proxied (orange cloud). Otherwise you'll get a TLS handshake failure.
• Apex CNAME limitations — most registrars don't support CNAME at the root. Use Cloudflare's CNAME flattening, ALIAS records (some registrars), or the A record we provide as a fallback.
• Caching — registrars sometimes cache old DNS for hours. If verify fails, wait 30 minutes and retry. Don't keep changing the records.

Removing a custom domain

Open Site → Custom domain → Remove. We'll release the SSL certificate and stop responding on that domain. Your site stays live on the facultydex.org subdomain. Don't forget to also remove the DNS records at your registrar — orphan DNS pointing at our infrastructure can cause confusing errors for anyone who bookmarked the URL.