By default, your Crowdicity community will be accessed through a Crowdicity sub-domain eg yourcommunity.crowdicity.com, but it is possible to run your community from a different URL. The URL of your community can be a new domain or a subdomain of one that you own.

Due to the processes involved, there is a fee for setting up a custom URL, please ask your Account Manager for further details.

In this article:

You must own the domain from which you want to run the address of your Crowdicity community, it could be a domain that you already own (eg your company website) or it could be one that you buy specifically for the purpose of running your community.

Your URL can be a subdomain of a domain that you own, but we do not support paths. e.g. you can have:

But it's not possible to have:

To set up a custom URL an 'SSL certificate' is required, but don't worry - this is something we'll order for you.
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An SSL Certificate encrypts information sent between your community and a users web browser. It's most commonly used when websites request sensitive information from a visitor such as passwords and credit card information. Your original community name uses the Crowdicity domain which has it's own SSL certificate. This means that while your community is 'yourdomain.crowdicity.com' your users' information is always safe and encrypted.

Once you have asked us to set up a custom URL, we'll just need you to do a couple of things so that we can order the SSL certificate:

1. Set up an email account
SSL certificates need to be verified by email by you, however, for security purposes, this can only be emailed to a predefined list of email addresses. So, before the certificate can be ordered, you'll need to set up and have access to one of the following addresses and you'll need to specify to us which one you will use:

admin@yourdomain.com*
​administrator@yourdomain.com
​hostmaster@yourdomain.com
​postmaster@yourdomain.com
​webmaster@yourdomain.com

* '@yourdomain.com' represents the domain from which you'd like your community to run.

2. Set the A record
A member of your IT team (or the person who controls your domain) must set the A-record of your domain to point to our servers.

For communities hosted in the UK (where the existing URL ends with crowdicity.com), the IP address for the A-record must be set to: 18.130.59.127

For communities hosted in Australia (where the existing URL ends with crowdicity.com.au), the IP address for the A-record must be set to: 54.252.205.44

3. When you're ready to go ahead, speak to your Account Manager and ask them to order the SSL certificate.

4. Approve the SSL
Once the SSL certificate has been ordered, it can take up to 5 working days to receive the verification email. When you do, the email will have a link to the following page:

You'll need to click I APPROVE so that the SSL Certificate can be issued to us.

5. Making your Custom URL active
So that your community can be accessed by the new URL, we'll need to install the certificate on your community. If there's a specific date that you'd like us to do this, please let us know. If we do not receive any instruction from you, we'll do this as soon as we receive the SSL Certificate and will email you to let you know.
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To make sure that both new and existing users can access the community, we'll put a 'Forward' on your original community URL. This means that if your original URL is used to access the community, users will automatically be directed to your custom URL.