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Deployment

Connecting a Custom Domain

Point a domain you own at your Render deployment, from any registrar, with automatic HTTPS.

Every deployed project gets a free onrender.com subdomain immediately, but a real product deserves its own domain. This guide covers connecting a domain from any registrar. If you bought your domain through the Spaceship integration, most of this is automated — see the Spaceship guide.

Before you start

You need a domain you own and access to its DNS settings at your registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Spaceship, wherever it is registered). Nothing about your registrar needs to change; you are only adding DNS records.

Steps

  1. In Idea to Life, open your project and go to Settings, then Domain, then "Connect existing domain". (You can equally do this directly in the Render dashboard under your service's Custom Domains — same result.)
  2. Enter your domain. Decide whether you want the bare domain (yourbusiness.com), the www form, or both — both is recommended, with one redirecting to the other.
  3. You will be shown DNS records to create at your registrar:
Type: A or ALIAS/ANAME   Host: @     Value: (shown for your service)
Type: CNAME              Host: www   Value: your-service.onrender.com

The apex (bare) domain uses an A record pointing at Render's IP, or an ALIAS/ANAME record if your DNS provider supports it. The www subdomain is always a CNAME.

  1. Add the records in your registrar's DNS panel, save, and return to verify.

Propagation and HTTPS

DNS changes usually take effect within minutes but can take up to a few hours to propagate everywhere. Once the records resolve, Render automatically provisions a free TLS certificate for your domain, renews it forever, and serves your site over HTTPS. You never buy or install a certificate.

If verification stalls for more than a couple of hours, the most common causes are: a typo in the record value, a conflicting old record on the same host (delete stale A or CNAME records), or a proxy setting at your DNS provider. On Cloudflare specifically, set the record to "DNS only" (grey cloud) until the certificate is issued; you can re-enable the proxy afterwards.

Subdomains

Connecting app.yourbusiness.com or booking.yourbusiness.com instead of the main domain works the same way but needs only the single CNAME record. This is the right pattern when your main website lives elsewhere and Idea to Life built one part of your online presence.

Costs

Render does not charge for custom domains or certificates on any tier. Your only domain cost is the registration fee you pay your registrar. The onrender.com subdomain keeps working after you attach a custom domain, which is occasionally useful for testing.