Point your custom domain to your Castos Podcast Website

Point your own custom domain to your podcast website at Castos.

To complete the process:

Enter the domain name you wish to use in the desired podcast's Website Settings → Advanced Options from your Castos dashboard
Update the DNS records on that domain from its registrar to point to your Castos podcast website

Enter the custom domain

1: Sign in to your Castos dashboard and click Settings of the desired podcast

2

Click Website, then click Advanced Options

3

Add your registered custom domain without http:// or https:// (Example: my-podcast-site.com) to the field in Custom Domain Settings and click Add:

4: Your custom domain for this podcast will be added and awaiting verification of DNS settings, outlined below:

Update DNS records with your domain registrar

Now that you’ve told Castos that you want to use a custom domain for your Castos-created podcast website, you’ll need to tell your domain registrar (the place where you bought the domain) where to point the domain.

We do this through DNS records.

DNS tells domain registrars information about where your browser can look to find information about the domain and where to find it.

Preferred Option

We suggest using Cloudflare to manage your DNS. Cloudflare offers three major benefits when it comes to DNS management:

DDoS and other types of hacking protection services
Free SSL certificates so your podcast website can run on HTTPS, great for SEO and the website safety
It's completely free

Here are the steps you need to follow within Cloudflare:

1: Sign up for your Free Cloudflare account.
2: Update your domain’s nameservers to point to your assigned Cloudflare nameservers.
3: Create a new CNAME record for your domain
4: Give the CNAME record a name of @
5: Use the value of pages.castos.com for that domain record. Note that this is without the https:// part of the URL.
6: Save that CNAME record and wait for the DNS to propagate.

Here is a complete walkthrough of the process from Cloudflare.

Your DNS settings in Cloudflare should look like this when you're all done.

Leave the Proxy Status as Proxied.

Leave SSL/TLS Rule as Full.

Note on DNS Propagation

It can take up to 24 hours for DNS to propagate. This is entirely dependent on our domain registrar and the rest of the internet.

Note on Hosting Encryption Requirements

If your hosting requires you to use a different SSL mode, you can achieve this by setting your encryption to Strict and using page rules. The Cloudflare community has a tutorial to help.

Alternative Option

If your domain registrar does not allow you to create a CNAME record as the only value for your domain (the Apex value) then you will need to create a single A Record in your DNS provider and give it a value of 44.231.81.151

Checking the status of your DNS

If you want to check the status of your DNS propagation after you've made the changes above, you can do so here.

Here just enter the domain name you're using for your podcast website, and make sure that the A record is selected. If you see the IP address listed above (the 44.231.81.151 value) then you're all set with the DNS portion of things.

Verify Configuration on Castos

1: Once your DNS settings are configured on your domain registrar, return to your Castos dashboard Website Settings → Advanced Options and click Verify:

Note

Castos can only support either the naked domain https://mypodcastsite.com or the www version of the domain, https://www.mypodcastwebsite.com. You'll need to create a 301 redirect to direct the alternate version of the domain to the one that you've entered within the Custom Domain settings of the dashboard. Using the example domain from the screenshots above, this would mean a 301 redirect would need to be created for https://www.appreciating-mangroves-podcast.com to redirect to https://appreciating-mangroves-podcast.com because this is the domain that has been entered in the Custom Domain Settings