Domain Masking

Modified on Tue, 27 Sep 2022 at 08:21 AM

Zuddl lets you add a custom subdomain for your event sites like "events.acme.com" or "conferences.acme.com. The subdomain (“events” or “conferences” in the above example), once mapped to your organization in Zuddl, can be used to host all your events instead of app.zuddl.com.

Adding a custom subdomain

The subdomain for events are mapped to your organization in Zuddl. There can only be one subdomain for each organization.

Important

The entire process of mapping and validating a new subdomain to your organization in Zuddl may take upto 5-7 days. Ensure that you take into account this time frame before organizing your next event.

Prerequisites

Decide on a suitable subdomain name such as, events.acme.com or conferences.acme.com that can be used for all future events.
Send an email to your account executive or the CSM at Zuddl with the following details:
1. Organization name
2. Name of the subdomain

Upon receiving your details, Zuddl maps the given subdomain to your organization in the backend. Once the mapping is successful, a confirmation email is sent which contains two CNAME records: a subdomain name and a random unique validation string. The following sections describe them in detail.

Steps to add your custom domain

Once you’ve received the confirmation email:

Sign in to your domain host.
Tip: If you don’t know your domain host, check your billing records in your mailbox or visit https://lookup.icann.org/ In your domain's DNS records, create two CNAME records:
1. The subdomain name that points to your domain. For example, if you want to represent virtual.foobar.com, enter “virtual” in the Name column. In the corresponding Value column, copy and paste the value shared in the confirmation email.
2. A unique string for verifying the ownership of the subdomain. For example, _c3e2d7eaf1e656b73f46cd6980fdc0e. This unique string points to the ACM validation certificate which is the validation server. For example, _cjhwou20vhu2exampleuw20vuyb2ovb9.j9s73ucn9vy.acm-validations.aws
A validated ACM generates a SSL/TLS certificate for your subdomain.

S.No.	Name	Record type	Value
1	examplestring.virtual	CNAME	randomstring.acm-validations.aws
2	virtual	CNAME	foobar.randomstring.cloudfront.net

Once the records are added into your DNS, the validation may take upto 48 hours. After successful validation, the events can be hosted from the new custom subdomain instead of app.zuddl.com

Note

The CNAME records sent by Zuddl must be added to your DNS within a prescribed time window of 48 hours to avoid expiration of the records. Should the records expire, the same process needs to be followed to make a fresh request.

Important:

The event setup-side remains unaffected by the domain changes for the live site and can only be accessed from app.zuddl.com.
The subdomains mapped are at organization level. Any event created by the organization is mapped to the custom domain set.
Future changes to the custom domain follow the same process as explained above.

Use of root domains

For adding a custom domain, we only accept subdomains (www.acme.com) and not root domains (acme.com). This is because, unlike root domains, sub-domains don’t need a static IP address and they allow CNAME records for mapping with a custom domain.

As a workaround, you can configure a redirect in your DNS for your root domain (for example, acme.com) to a subdomain of your choice (www.acme.com), and we can map the custom domain with the subdomain.