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How to use a custom domain for your affiliate dashboard
How to use a custom domain for your affiliate dashboard
Kyle Fox avatar
Written by Kyle Fox
Updated over a week ago

By default your affiliate dashboard (where your affiliates log in to view links and stats) lives on a subdomain of Rewardful, for example:

Our Growth plan allows you to use a custom domain for your affiliate dashboard, making for a more seamless brand experience, for example:

  • affiliates.my-awesome-company.com

Using a custom domain along with your own logo, favicon, and color (also included in Growth) allow you to effectively whitelabel Rewardful and display the affiliate dashboard under your own brand.

All custom domains automatically include free SSL ๐Ÿ‘

1. Create a CNAME record

To setup a custom domain, create a CNAME for your desired domain (affiliates.example.com) that points to domains.rewardful.comย 

Note: your CNAME must point to "domains.rewardful.com", not your Rewardful subdomain (ex: "my-company.getrewardful.com").

2. Check your CNAME record

Use a CNAME lookup tool (like this one) to double-check that your CNAME is correct.

โœ… If your CNAME is correct you'll see something like this:

โ›”๏ธ If your CNAME is incorrect you'll see something like this:

If you're having trouble setting up the CNAME, please contact your domain name registrar for further assistance.

3. Contact us to finish the setup

Once you've followed the steps above and have confirmed that your CNAME is correct, contact us via chat or email (hello@rewardful.com) and we'll finish the setup for you! It generally takes ~24 hours for your custom domain to finish the setup.


SSL Certificates and CAA Records

Note: this section only applies if you have added CAA DNS records to your domain or subdomain.

Rewardful automatically issues an SSL/TLS certificate for your custom domain through Let's Encrypt and/or ZeroSSL. In order for this process to work, your domain must either have a blank CAA record or a CAA record that permits both of these services to issue certificates:

  • letsencrypt.org

  • sectigo.com

You can add these CAA records from your domain name registrar, or wherever your DNS records are configured.

Whatโ€™s a CAA record?

A Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) record is used to specify which certificate authorities (CAs) are allowed to issue certificates for a domain.

CAA records allow domain owners to declare which certificate authorities are allowed to issue a certificate for a domain. They also provide a means of indicating notification rules in case someone requests a certificate from an unauthorized certificate authority. If no CAA record is present, any CA is allowed to issue a certificate for the domain. If a CAA record is present, only the CAs listed in the record(s) are allowed to issue certificates for that hostname.

CAA records can set policy for the entire domain or for specific hostnames. CAA records are also inherited by subdomains. For example, a CAA record set on example.com also applies to any subdomain, like subdomain.example.com (unless overridden).

(Source: DNSimple Help)

How to check your CAA records

The simplest way to check your CAA records is with the online DNS CAA Tester. As long as the results for your subdomain indicate either "No CAA found" or list both letsencrypt.org and sectigo.com you're good to go ๐Ÿ‘

If you see any other result, you'll need to modify your CAA DNS records to permit both letsencrypt.org and sectigo.com to issue certificates for your subdomain.

More advanced users can verify their CAA DNS records using the command line. The dig command will list the CAA records (if any) for a domain. Remember to check the subdomain and the domain itself, and that subdomains inherit the CAA records from the parent domain:

dig +noall +answer example.com caa
dig +noall +answer affiliates.example.com caa

Related:

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