Custom Domain Name

Cloud CMS allows you to customize the domain name for the editorial user interface. Custom domain names are supported for both SaaS and on-premise installation accounts.

Tenant URL

Every Cloud CMS subscriber is given a tenant domain URL that looks like this:

mytenant.cloudcms.net

Where mytenant is the subdomain you picked when you created your account. You're free to change this subdomain at any time (no additional steps needed).

This URL serves back the editorial environment for your tenant using secure-socket (HTTPS). This secure-socket requirement is to ensure that all communication between your users' browsers and the user interface takes advantage of channel encryption. This helps to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks or exposure of data over the wire.

Custom Domains

You may wish to provide the Cloud CMS editorial environment using a completely custom domain (or subdomain). For example, you might wish to make the editorial environment available to your end users like this:

cms.mycompany.org

Where mycompany.org is a fictitious top-level domain name and cms is a subdomain. You can configure any domain name you like to work with Cloud CMS, including top-level domains, subdomains and so on.

Whatever name you choose, you first need to make sure that you own it:

  • If you are part of a company that has an IT organization, we recommend checking with them. Chances are you already own mycompany.org and so you don't need to set anything else up.

  • If you don't own mycompany.org, you will need to buy it and then configure it.

We recommend using Amazon Web Services for your back end infrastructure and to that end, the steps provided here reference Amazon's services.

  1. If you don't already own your intended domain name, you can buy it using Amazon Route 53. Alternatively, if you do already own the domain name, you might consider transferring its name servers over to Route 53 since Amazon's platform is excellent.

  2. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with https://mytenant.cloudcms.net as its origin server. The connection to the origin server should be HTTPS. The incoming should be HTTP (not secure). Set it up to forward all headers, cookie state and query parameters. The cache TTL should be 0.

  3. In Amazon Route 53, add or modify the entry for cms.mycompany.org and set it up as a CNAME reference to your CloudFront distribution. The record may look something like this:

    cms.mycompany.org. 300 IN CNAME {cloudfrontId}.cloudfront.net

Be sure to save your changes.

Once your changes are saved, you will need to wait a little while for DNS propagation to occur. Your DNS company will push the changes worldwide to domain name servers all around the globe. This usually takes about 15 minutes on average but can take longer depending on where you are in the world.

We recommend using the What's My DNS service to check if propagation has completed. This service checks servers worldwide and performs local lookups to see if your DNS record has been updated.

Just fill in your domain and it will display results across servers.

When your CloudFront distribution is spun up and the DNS entries have completed propagation, you will be able to access your Cloud CMS UI using the new URL:

http://cms.mycompany.org

In addition to providing for custom domain support, Amazon CloudFront provides edge caching and optimized network performance. Your end users will be very pleased with these benefits.

SSL

As mentioned, Cloud CMS provides a default tenant URL (*.cloudcms.net) that you can use right away. This URL is available as both HTTP and HTTPS. Cloud CMS provides the SSL certificate for your default tenant URL. Thus, you can access your editorial environment using either of these imaginary URLs:

http://mytenant.cloudcms.net
https://mytenant.cloudcms.net

The steps above detail how you can get the following working:

http://cms.mycompany.org

If you want to enable HTTPS on your custom domain, there a few additional steps:

  1. Purchase an SSL certificate. We recommend using Amazon Certificate Manager but you may also choose to buy from someplace like GoDaddy.

  2. Upload your SSL certificate to Amazon.

  3. Add your SSL certificate to your CloudFront distribution.

That's it. Once the certificate is in place, you'll be able to access your secure editorial environment like this:

https://cms.mycompany.org