Visualise & share
Your own domain
Serve your group's public site on a hostname you own: the TXT record that proves it is yours, the CNAME, and what to do when it does not work.
What this does
Your group's public site normally lives at this platform's address. A custom domain serves that same site on a hostname you own instead — data.example.org, creek.yourcity.gov — with its own HTTPS certificate, so visitors never see the platform's name at all.
What is served there is exactly what is on your public site today: your landing page, your published maps, dashboards and analytics pages, and the documentation sections you chose in the studio. Your site's landing page is at / on your domain, so https://data.example.org/ is your front page and https://data.example.org/maps/ your list of maps.
Public and read-only. There is no sign-in on a custom domain. You and your members keep signing in at the platform address for alerts, sensors, Data quality and the studio; anything on your domain that is not part of your published site answers Not found. That is deliberate — it is what keeps your domain from carrying sessions, passwords or anyone else's tenant.
Before you start
- You must be the group's owner or an admin — the same people who can publish the site.
- Your site must be published. A verified domain on an unpublished site serves nothing; un-publishing takes the custom domain dark with it, immediately.
- You must be able to add DNS records for the domain. That usually means access to Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Route 53 or whoever holds the domain, or a colleague who has it.
- Your operator has to add the hostname at the platform's edge. That step is what issues the certificate, and it is not something you can do from here.
A subdomain, unless your DNS is at Cloudflare
Pointing a hostname at us needs a CNAME record, and the DNS standards do not allow a CNAME on a bare domain (example.org with nothing in front) — it collides with the records that carry your email and your zone's own housekeeping. Cloudflare works around this with CNAME flattening, so if your DNS is hosted at Cloudflare a bare domain is fine. GoDaddy does not flatten, and neither do most other registrars; there, use a subdomain such as data.example.org or www.example.org. A subdomain is the safe choice everywhere, and it is what we would suggest even at Cloudflare.
Setting it up
- Claim the hostname. Open the Site studio for your group, then Your own domain, and type the hostname. Nothing is served on it yet: a claim on its own does nothing at all.
- Prove it is yours. The page shows one TXT record — a name beginning
_nightheron-challengeand a value beginningnightheron-site-verification=. Add it at your DNS provider exactly as shown, then press Check now. Until this passes, the hostname is inert: a visitor typing it reaches nothing of ours.- At Cloudflare: DNS → Records → Add record → type TXT, name
_nightheron-challenge.data(Cloudflare appends your zone), content = the value. Set it to DNS only; a TXT record is never proxied anyway. - At GoDaddy: Domains → DNS → Add → type TXT, Host
_nightheron-challenge.data(GoDaddy also appends your domain, so do not type the domain again), Value = the value, TTL 1 hour.
- At Cloudflare: DNS → Records → Add record → type TXT, name
- Tell your operator the hostname. They add it as a custom hostname at the platform's edge; that is what obtains and renews the HTTPS certificate for your name. They will give you a CNAME target to point at.
- Add the CNAME. A record of type CNAME, name
data(the part before your domain), value = the target your operator gave you. At Cloudflare, leave the orange cloud on unless your operator says otherwise. - Open it.
https://data.example.org/should show your landing page. The certificate can take a few minutes after the CNAME appears.
Leave the TXT record in place afterwards. It is re-checked daily, and it is the standing evidence that the domain is still yours; a domain whose record has been gone for a week stops being served, and you would then re-add the record and press Check again.
When it does not work
| What you see | What it usually is |
|---|---|
| Check now says no TXT record was found. | Either it has not propagated yet — wait ten minutes and press it again — or the name is doubled up. Most registrars add your domain for you, so typing _nightheron-challenge.data.example.org into GoDaddy's Host box creates the record at _nightheron-challenge.data.example.org.example.org. Type only the part before your domain. Check the value was copied whole, including nightheron-site-verification=. |
| Verified, but the browser cannot reach the domain, or warns about the certificate. | The CNAME is missing, points somewhere else, or your operator has not added the hostname at the edge yet. Those are the two halves of step 3 and 4 and they are separate: verification is ours, the certificate is the edge's. Send your operator the hostname and ask whether it is active there. |
| The domain loads but shows Not found. | Either your site is not published (tick Publish this site in the studio), or you asked for a page that is not part of your public site. Only your own published pages are reachable on your domain — not sign-in, not another group's pages, not the platform's. |
| A page on your site is missing from your domain. | It is not published. A map, dashboard or analytics page appears on your public site — and therefore on your domain — only when its own visibility is Public. A password-protected page is deliberately never listed. |
Releasing, renaming and deleting
Releasing a domain (the Release button) frees the name at once. Anyone visiting it stops seeing your site, and another group may then claim it — but they would have to prove ownership from scratch with a new record of their own, so releasing a name does not hand it to anybody. Remove the CNAME at your DNS provider too, or visitors will be sent to a platform that no longer knows who they are asking for.
Renaming your group changes nothing here, in the same way it does not move your published map and analytics links.
Deleting the group releases every domain it held.
One name, one group. A hostname can be claimed by only one group on this platform. If a name is already claimed, we will not say by whom — ask your operator. A claim that is never proved is released automatically after two weeks, so a typo or an abandoned attempt does not hold a name for ever.