Using your own domain

Three shapes work, in this order of recommendation:

A subdomain, such as art.yourdomain.com — works with every DNS provider, no exceptions, and leaves an existing website at your domain untouched: the two sites live side by side.

www, as in www.yourdomain.com — also works everywhere. Once it is active, your portfolio settings offer to send the bare domain to it: a TXT record that proves the bare domain is yours and two A records, and every link to yourdomain.com — https:// included — redirects to your site.

Your bare domain (yourdomain.com, nothing in front) is the one shape with a hard restriction: it can point at Practice Archive only when your domain's DNS is hosted at Cloudflare. On any other DNS provider, use www or a subdomain instead — an ALIAS or ANAME record will appear to be set up correctly but can never finish activating. That is a limitation of the network we serve custom domains through, not of your provider.

Serving a site from www and redirecting the bare domain to it is not a compromise — it is how most large websites work. google.com, amazon.com and nytimes.com all redirect to their www. addresses, for the same underlying reason: the bare name has technical restrictions in DNS that www does not. Visitors who type the bare domain still arrive at your site.

Add your chosen name in your portfolio settings and it shows you one TXT record that proves the domain is yours. Add it first, at whoever hosts your domain's DNS (usually your registrar), then press Check status. Once it is found, settings show the rest — typically two CNAME records. Copy the names and values exactly.

A domain whose TXT record is never found is released after seven days, so nobody can hold a name they cannot prove is theirs. You can add it again at any time.

The records affect only the exact names shown — nothing else on your domain, and never your email. You should not change your MX records or your bare domain's existing records for any of this.

After adding the records, use Check status in your portfolio settings. “Waiting for your DNS records” typically clears within minutes, though provider propagation can stretch it to an hour.

Until the domain is Active, visiting it shows an error page (often “error 1001”) and https:// refuses to connect. That is the normal not-yet-active state, not a fault — the secure certificate for your domain is issued as part of activation, and HTTPS starts working a few minutes after the status turns Active.

Stuck on “waiting for your DNS records”: re-check each record against the settings page character by character, and confirm they were added on the right domain. A trailing dot in the value is fine; a record added as art.yourdomain.com.yourdomain.com (some panels append the domain themselves) is the most common miss.

The bare domain never activates: see section 1 — outside Cloudflare-hosted DNS this cannot complete. Remove the bare domain, add www.yourdomain.com instead, and once it is active use the offer in your portfolio settings to send the bare domain to it with two A records.

The bare-domain redirect says a record is missing: both A records matter — same name, one IP each. With only one added the redirect works, but add the second for redundancy; some panels want the bare-domain name written as @, others want it blank.

“That name is already in use” when adding: our pre-flight check found the name currently points at a live site. If that site is the one you mean to replace, the override button proceeds — traffic moves to your portfolio once the records change, so only override a name you are ready to repoint.

Anything else, or any doubt at all: meli@mail.thepracticearchive.com. Include your domain name and the name of your DNS provider and we will look from our side.