By Ben Butler, Founder and Lead Developer, Headless Hostman
Our DNS launch center — located within the Cult Portal — is a major functionality release that enables you to go from sign up to launch without requiring our team’s assistance.
You might be asking … Well, isn’t DNS management par for the course for a “hosting” company?
The answer is yes, for a “traditional hosting company,” but we are not a traditional WordPress hosting company.
It’s likely different than your normal DNS switch experience, but uses the same foundations. Read carefully and don’t hesitate to hit us up via Live Chat or email if you have any questions.
Be prepared:
For smoother switchovers:
And honestly, take it from me, don’t be in a huge rush at the eleventh hour. Be sure you’re calculated and have a schedule set.
Our Cult Portal is our equivalent of a cPanel or normal host dashboard.
All of our Sites Start Default with a Test Static URL
Which you’ll see boldly called out. This enables you to test your WordPress site on Static immediately.
Obviously, you don’t want to use that as your live domain, so let’s fix that.
Under DNS, click “Change Live URL” and enter the final domain you intend for the public to use.
There are four situations that arise:
We Auto-Detect Your Situation and Update the Prompts for You
Based on what you enter as your intended Live URL we will dynamically render the next-steps for you according to the following situations:
This is the simplest and most familiar path to launch. This version is also known as a www CNAME subdomain.
When we detect your Live URL lives at WWW, we just need a few records updated. This can be done through any traditional DNS provider.
Enter the records as indicated and wait for them to turn green.
This path is also pretty straight forward. All you need to do is update a single subdomain.
This might be a slight shock to your system, so please read this one carefully.
Cloudflare Static cannot accept an A Record (example.com is an Apex Record at @) pointed at an IP address.
It uses a Flattened A Record as a CNAME, which is a Cloudflare-only feature.
We we wrote an entire article about why this is important here
If you’d like to use example.com, you need to switch your Nameservers to Cloudflare to get access to A Record Flattening.
We make it easy with our premium Cloudflare integration. It’s just updating one thing.
If we auto-detect an Apex domain, not already on Cloudflare, we automatically add your domain to the Headless Hostman Cloudflare infrastructure.
All you need to do is change your Nameservers, as indicated. That’s it.
If your DNS is already on Cloudflare, we can’t auto-launch it through our system. We need a delegated access point to coordinate from first.
There is no way around this. This is a security feature imposed by Cloudflare to prevent misuse.
Once you delegate an access point to us, we will coordinate the rest of the launch for you.
The following applies to Situations 1, 2, and 3.
Regardless of Situation 1, 2, or 3, when it’s ready you’ll see green checkboxes and a new button that says “Update Static Site URL and Repush Static Site.”
By clicking the button we:
If you are Situation 3 (the Cloudflare nameserver change), we do a few more things automatically for you.
Our Static Conversion tool uses a domain search and replace during Static generation. This makes sure the Static files have the right domain in their markup.
From the steps above your WordPress site now has the Live URL, but the Static files need updated to reflect it.
Your next prompt will be to repush the website with the Live URL in use.
Until you do this, this warning will not go away.
And by this point, your DNS is set in all the right places, so things will be broken until you complete a re-push. Do this immediately.
Luckily, the final launch push shouldn’t take long.
Independently change DNS and push your Static WordPress site. No intervention needed.
Again, if you’d like to coordinate launch with us we’re happy to assist with a notice of 2 business days.
The DNS launcher is only for customers using our native Cloudflare network.
Enteprise users using the AWS integration must handle the switches within AWS and Cloudfront.