Idea to Life
Back to documentation
Integrations

Buying and Connecting Domains with Spaceship

Search, register, and connect a custom domain through the Spaceship integration without leaving the platform.

Idea to Life integrates with Spaceship, a domain registrar, so you can search for, purchase, and connect a custom domain without leaving the platform. The domain is registered to you, in your Spaceship account, at Spaceship's normal prices — the integration is a convenience, not a markup or a middleman that holds your domain.

Why Spaceship

Any registrar works with Idea to Life (see the Custom Domains guide for the general procedure). The Spaceship integration exists because it automates the fiddly part: once you buy a domain through the integration, the platform can create the DNS records for your Render deployment automatically instead of walking you through copying values into a DNS panel.

Buying a domain

  1. Open your project and go to Settings, then Domain, then "Find a domain".
  2. Search for the name you want. Availability and yearly price are shown per TLD (.com, .io, .co, and many others).
  3. Choose one and complete the purchase. Payment goes to Spaceship, and the domain is registered under your Spaceship account. If you do not have one, you will be prompted to create it during checkout — keep those credentials, the domain is a real asset of yours.
Watch renewal pricing, not just first-year pricing. Some TLDs are heavily discounted the first year and cost considerably more to renew. The purchase screen shows both.

Connecting it to your product

After purchase, the platform:

  1. Adds the domain to your Render service.
  2. Creates the required DNS records in Spaceship (an A or ALIAS record for the apex domain, a CNAME for www).
  3. Waits for DNS propagation and certificate issuance. Render provisions a free TLS certificate automatically, so your site serves over HTTPS with no extra steps.

This normally completes within minutes, though DNS propagation can occasionally take a few hours.

Using a subdomain

You can also connect subdomains like app.yourbusiness.com — useful if your main site lives elsewhere and Idea to Life built just a portal or booking system. Specify the subdomain when connecting and only a single CNAME record is created.

Email and other DNS records

Owning the domain in Spaceship means you control all its DNS. Records for Resend email verification (SPF, DKIM) live in the same Spaceship DNS panel and, if you use the Resend integration, can be added for you.

Ownership, plainly

The domain belongs to you. You can log in to Spaceship directly at any time, transfer the domain to another registrar (after ICANN's standard 60-day lock on new registrations), or point it at any other host. Disconnecting from Idea to Life never affects your domain registration.