Domains networking setup

When you publish your website, you need to decide on what domain will your site be hosted. Bytebard offers a free subdomain when you create a site, that is easy to setup and can be changed anytime. An example of blog with subdomain would be:

https://example.bytebard.cc/

However, there are certain benefits of bringing your own domain. It will remove bytebard branding from the URL and might be better for SEO. In order to use a custom domain, first you will need to purchase it at a third-party seller. After you succesfully obtained domain, you will need to assign it to Bytebard, which will be covered below. An example of blog with custom domain would be:

https://johnsmith.com/
https://blog.johnsmith.com/ (yes, you can use subdomain of your domain too!)

You can change your domain anytime, but both cannot co-exist. Whichever your latest choice, will be used in sitemaps, RSS feed, robots.txt and canonical URLs as a main URL.

DNS records

In order to assign domain to Bytebard, you will need to add (or replace) a DNS record A and set it to a static IP of 76.76.21.21. Here's am example of this record:

example.com. A 76.76.21.21 (or A @ 76.76.21.21)

After you create this record, give DNS some time to propagate (usually it takes couple minutes, but can take up to 24 hours). You can check if your domain is ready by running dig example.com in your system's terminal.

Redirects, HTTPS and subdomains

You can assign a single domain to your blog, it could be a 1st level domain (example.com) or a subdomain (blog.example.com); setup is same for either option. All requests are expected and served on HTTPS by default. If you want to redirect all requests from HTTP to HTTPS, you will need to configure it in your domain dashboard (not in Bytebard). It is generally recommended to configure following redirect:

http or https + www.example.com to https://example.com

If you do not have such configuration possibility in your domain provider, you can explore options like Cloudflare.