Using a Custom Domain

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When you start using Files.com, you start with a custom subdomain. This is something like mycompany.files.com. This was automatically generated based on the company name you entered when you started your site.

If you have a trial site or an active site, you've already seen this, and you may have already discovered that you can change it through the web interface here in the site identity settings.

Your custom subdomain sits in front of our files.com domain, and together these make up the hostname that you and your users will use to connect to your site in a web browser or using any of our supported protocols like FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV.

But what if you would rather have a hostname that contains your own organization's domain?

No problem.

Files.com makes the process of setting up a custom domain for your site easy.

The first step is to choose what your custom domain will be. This can be a subdomain of any domain that you control. We suggest using something like files.yourdomain.com.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we have a fictional hot sauce company that uses the domain nuclearhotsauce.com, so we'll go with files.nuclearhotsauce.com for our custom domain.

Now that we've chosen what our custom domain will be, the next step is to set up a CNAME DNS record with our DNS provider pointing our new custom domain to our files.com subdomain. In many cases, your domain's DNS provider is the registrar you purchased your domain from, but if you're not sure who yours is, check with the person who manages your domain, and they should be able to help you with this step. Our fictional hot sauce company purchased its domain from Namecheap, so we'll log in there and head to "Advanced DNS" for our domain.

We'll click add new record. Choose CNAME for the record type. We're pointing the host files.nuclearhotsauce.com to our custom subdomain, nuclearhotsauce.files.com.

We'll save that, and now we've created our CNAME record. It may take some time for this record to propagate.

The last step to set up our custom domain is to simply enter it into your Files.com site at Settings >> Site identity >> Custom domain. So, we'll enter files.nuclearhotsauce.co, and click save.

Once we see that our site is accessible using our custom domain, we can take a look at the firewall configuration page in the web interface. [see video] You will find that at Settings >> Integrations >> View firewall configuration information.

If we scroll all the way to the bottom here, we can see the two dedicated IP addresses automatically provisioned for our site. You can provide these to your users who need to whitelist your IP addresses in their firewalls in order to connect.

If you have any questions, please feel free to Contact Us or give us a call at 1-800-286-8372.