What are custom domains?

By default, we provide Friendly Automate under a subdomain of ours, e.g. yourname.friendlyautomate.com.

With a custom domain Friendly Automate is available under your own domain or subdomain, e.g. info.yourdomain.com.

This gives you a number of benefits:

Landing pages run under your own domain or subdomain, e.g. info.yourdomain.com/landingpage1
Tracking of your website visitors is more reliable. If Friendly Automate runs under a subdomain of ours, you set a so-called "third-party cookie" for tracking your website visitors. This cookie is often automatically deleted after one week on many devices. You can then identify visitors for a maximum of one week. If Friendly Automate is accessible under your own domain or subdomain, you can set a "first-party cookie". This will be stored on your visitors’ devices virtually indefinitely, allowing you to identify your visitors over a very long period of time.
The links in sent emails for unsubscribing from the mailing list point to your own domain. This has a positive effect on the deliverability of your emails.

The hosting of Friendly Automate is of course completely up to us, even when using custom domains.

How do I set up a custom domain?

Technically, a custom domain works via a so-called domain alias (CNAME). In this way, your domain or subdomain points to our servers. This is how you set it up:

1. Decide on the name of your custom domain

A custom domain is usually a subdomain of your main domain. Only in this way you can benefit from all the advantages of a custom domain. If your main domain is yourdomain.com, a subdomain of it would be xyz.yourdomain.com, for example.

These subdomain names are most popular with our customers:

info.yourdomain.com
marketing.yourdomain.com
hello.yourdomain.com
friendly.yourdomain.com
automation.yourdomain.com

In the end it doesn't matter what exactly the subdomain is called - what matters is that you (and your visitors) like it.

2. Go to the DNS settings of your domain

Next, we create a CNAME record (domain alias) for the desired subdomain. To do this, first go to the so-called DNS manager of your domain.

With the provider Metanet for example you can find it here in the settings of the domain:

With the provider Hostpoint this function is here:

The layout is different for each provider. If you can't find the DNS settings for your domain, please check with the provider where you registered the domain.

3. Create a CNAME record for the chosen custom domain

Next, create a "CNAME" entry for the desired custom domain.

In Metanet you should select "CNAME" in this selection field and click "add":

With Hostpoint, the function would be here:

Now you need two pieces of information: the name (also called alias) and the destination (also called hostname).

Name (Alias): this is your desired subdomain. If you want your subdomain to be info.yourdomain.com, please enter "info" in this field.
Destination (hostname): this is the domain to which your CNAME (domain alias) should point. It corresponds to the domain where we originally set up Friendly Automate for you (without the https://). So if your Friendly Automate domain is https://yourname.friendlyautomate.com, enter "yourname.friendlyautomate.com" (without https://) as the destination.

With Metanet, it would look something like this:

And with Hostpoint like this:

4. Check if the subdomain is working

It takes up to 24 hours until a new subdomain is accessible from everywhere on the Internet. With a free service like the DNS Checker you can check yourself if the setup was successful and the subdomain is accessible everywhere.

If you see all green checkmarks and the correct destination, the setup was successful.

In the screenshot below, the destination is "hosted112.friendlyautomate.com". In your case, the target should correspond to your original friendlyautomate domain, e.g. "yourname.friendlyautomate.com".

On the other hand, if you see this, the CNAME entry is not working yet:

If the setup was done more than 24 hours ago and it is still not working, your settings are probably not correct. In this case, please check them and contact your domain provider if necessary.

5. Notify us on your custom domain

If the setup was completed successfully during the last step, please contact us and provide us with the address of your custom domain. We will then activate it on our servers and set it as the default domain for your instance of Friendly Automate.

Do you have any questions? We are happy to help you via 📧 email, ☎️ phone and 👩‍💻 video calls.

Click here to go back to the main help page:

Friendly Automate

How to use custom domains