How to point your domain at Hubb

When your new site is ready, your domain needs to point at our servers instead of your old provider. You keep your domain exactly where it is: this is a small change inside your existing account, not a transfer. Give yourself an unhurried hour rather than doing it ten minutes before a service.

Before you start

• Make sure you can log in to wherever your domain is managed. This is often a registrar such as 123-reg, Fasthosts or GoDaddy, but it can be your old website provider or your email provider.
• Ask us for the IP address for your bare domain (your address without the www). It is not the same for every site, so please do not copy one from an old email or another church’s instructions. Your www address does not use an IP address: it points to sites.hubb.digital, or sites2.hubb.digital if your site is on our US platform. We’ll confirm which when we give you the IP address.
• Leave your MX records alone. They control your email, and nothing in this guide should touch them.
• Leave your name servers alone. Your name servers are part of your own setup, not ours, and changing them is a much bigger step that is not needed here.

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Making the change

1. Find the DNS settings for your domain. They are usually under a heading like ‘DNS’, ‘Advanced DNS’ or ‘Manage records’.
2. Lower the TTL on your existing records first if you can, to 300 seconds (five minutes) or the lowest your provider allows. TTL is how long the rest of the internet is allowed to remember the old answer, so lowering it before you switch means the change spreads faster. Ideally do this a day ahead.
3. Edit the A record for your bare domain so it points at the IP address we gave you. Most providers show the bare domain as @, and some just leave the name blank.
4. Set www as a CNAME pointing to sites.hubb.digital. If there is already an A record for www, change its type to CNAME if your provider allows it. If it doesn’t, delete the A record and straight away add the CNAME in its place. Enter just “www” as the name, not your full address. If your DNS is with Cloudflare, set the record’s Proxy status to DNS only (grey cloud).
5. Deal with any conflict. A CNAME can’t share its name with any other record, so if your provider warns that a record already exists for www, replace it. For your bare domain, make sure there is only one A record: two A records for the same name will send some visitors to the old site and some to the new one, which is worse than either.
6. Remove any leftover records from your old provider that point the website elsewhere, such as an AAAA record for www or a record left over from an old site builder. If you are not sure what a record is for, leave it and ask us.
7. Tell us it is done. We pick the domain up at our end and switch your site’s main address over to it.
8. Once everything is settled, put the TTL back up to something normal, such as an hour.

Pointing www at sites.hubb.digital means that when we improve or move our servers, your www address keeps working without you needing to change anything. Find out more in improving how your domain connects to Hubb.

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Sorting out your email at the same time

Once your site sends from your own domain rather than a hubb.church address, mail providers need to be told we are allowed to send on your behalf. That is the SPF record, and SPF records covers it. Two things trip people up: you should only ever have one SPF record, and you must keep the entries that are already in it for Microsoft, Google or whoever hosts your mailboxes. Adding a second SPF record breaks both.

It is also worth reading why your site shouldn’t email itself before go-live, because the address your site sends from and the address your notifications arrive at should not be the same one.

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Good to know

• DNS changes take time to spread, and a low TTL helps but does not control it completely. Some providers are quick and some take several hours. If nothing has moved after a few hours, tell us what you can see and we will check from our side.
• Your site stays reachable on its hubb.church address throughout, so nothing is ever down while you wait.
• Links in emails your site sends follow your site’s main web address, so once we switch it over they use your own domain automatically. The exception is any link someone typed out in full inside a template, which will still point wherever it was typed.
• Free online SPF and DNS checking tools vary in quality and some are no longer maintained, so treat a confusing result as a reason to ask us rather than a reason to change something.
• Keep the account your domain lives in in good order: a card that expires or an administrator who leaves the church is the most common cause of a website suddenly disappearing, and it is the one thing we cannot fix from here.
• Our guide on things to check when going live covers everything else worth doing on the day.