Using Your Domain Name

Your Domain Name

Harmony wants you to use your own domain name for your sites1. Simply place your domain name into the ‘Primary Domain’ field when you create your site (or in the site settings area after), and point your domain at Harmony. We’ll take care of the rest. 1If you don’t have a domain name, you can get one at any name register, like NameCheap, for example.

Pointing Your Domain

The easiest way and most recommended way to setup your domain name for Harmony is to use your registrar’s DNS settings to create a CNAME record pointing www.yourdomain.com to yoursite.harmonyapp.com. This will work for any subdomain you wish to point to Harmony, including ‘www’.

If you want to point your root, or naked domain (yourdomain.com with nothing in front), we recommend using your DNS service to add a Redirect, ANAME, or Alias record. Once you have set up www.yourdomain.com according to the section above, you then point yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com and you’re good to go.

Most good DNS providers will let you create this type of record.

If your registrar does not allow you to manage your DNS settings, or create Redirect/ANAME/Alias records, there are several services that will do this for you, such as DNS Made Easy, Zerigo, or DNSimple.

Root Domains with A Records

We recommend against using root or “naked” domains. They make it harder for Harmony to take proactive measures to keep your site up and fast in the event of an outage or network interruption. Our friends at Heroku have great documentation about the issues surrounding root domains.

If you cannot add a Redirect type record as above, you’ll likely need to create two A records for this, pointing to the Harmony IP addresses 54.235.208.208 and 54.235.208.220. We highly recommend using Redirect/ANAME/Alias records instead of A records.