Custom Domains

Introduction

Using a custom domain with your pod, allows you to make it available under your own name and brand. Like blog.joedoe.com. This is a great way to make it consistent with other websites and email. If you already own a domain, you can use it with your pod in an instant. So it will be reachable as e.g. status.my-domain.com or my-domain.com.

If you don’t have a domain yet, it’s also easy to register one. Domaintyper is a good starting point to find available domains. To compare prices, we like TLDes (no affiliation). See the below video to see the full process from buying a domain to setting it up with PikaPods.

Using Custom Domains

To use your own domain, you need to add a CNAME or ALIAS record and set your pod’s pikapod.net domain as target.

We will also apply for a free SSL certificate for each mapped domain. This ensures all data going to your pod is encrypted. It can take a few minutes before the pod is reachable from the new domain. You may see an error before this.

Steps to use a custom domain:

  1. Open Pod Settings and then the Domain tab.
  2. Enable Custom Domain. Take note of your pod’s xxx-yyy.pikapod.net subdomain
  3. Ensure no CAA records are set that may prevent us from applying for a SSL certificate. If you already use CAA, please also add sectigo.com, as mentioned here and letsencrypt.org as mentioned here.

  4. Then, depending on if you want to map a subdomain (e.g. status.my-domain.com) or root (apex) domain (e.g. my-domain.com):

    CNAME record for subdomains: status.my-domain.com. 3600 IN CNAME xxx-yyy.pikapod.net

    ALIAS record for root domains: @ 3600 IN ALIAS xxx-yyy.pikapod.net

  5. Use a tool like DNS Checker to ensure the record on your domains shows your pikapod.net domain or the same IP.
  6. Finally, add the new domain on PikaPod’s control panel. If the setup is correct, it will be verified and saved.

After adding a domain, we will periodically check if DNS is still set up correctly. If there is any issue you will receive a notification.

Only one custom domain can be mapped per pod. If you need additional alias domains, you will need to set up redirects with your DNS provider or a service like Freedirector (free, no signup needed) or redirect.pizza (free tier).

Cloudflare

It’s possible to run a pod behind Cloudflare’s proxy after it’s set up. This will send all user requests to Cloudflare first and then to PikaPods. The setup can be useful for pods that get many outside visitors, but will make your experience slower for private pods that are only used after the user logged in.

Common Issues

Enabling proxy feature: When first adding a custom domain via Cloudflare, ensure the Proxy feature is disabled. Else we can’t verify the DNS settings of your domain. You can enable proxying again after adding the custom domain.

Origin SSL Setting: Also ensure that you activate Full SSL encryption (by default, it is set to Flexible SSL, which will cause an infinite loop) or disable the proxy and switch to DNS-only mode.

Web application firewall (WAF): If you use Cloudflare’s proxy feature, it’s possible that our monitoring will get blocked and we can no longer determine if your pod is available on its custom domain. So if you get alert emails, while your pod is available, you can whitelist our control panel to make sure it can do its status checks. See here on how to change access rules. IPs to add will be the ones used by our control panel and may change. Check the current A (IPv4) and AAAA (IPv6) records for api.pikapods.com for numeric IPs.