Using your own Domain Name

From Doc

You can display your Phanfare Site under your own domain name. For example. you can have your Phanfare albums appear under the domain www.yourdomain.com, if you own the domain yourdomain.com. Using your own domain is a good way to present yourself in a professional manner if you are running a business and the equivalent of a vanity license plate for personal use. Your own domain can be more memorable to your viewers than a Phanfare domain (although we like our name!).

Table of contents

1 Creating a CNAME in your domain 2 Adding the CNAME to Phanfare 3 Gotchas 4 Requirements

Creating a CNAME in your domain

Your CNAME should point from your desired hostname (for e.g.: photos.yourdomain.com) to albums.phanfare.com.

You typically create the CNAME using your domain's management interface. If you don't know how to create a CNAME, you should go to the help or support pages for your domain registrar. Usually they have detailed instructions. If not, their support people should be able to help you set it up.

If you happen to run your own BIND server, than the record looks like this:

foo.example.com CNAME albums.phanfare.com

Wikipedia has a thorough article on CNAMES (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME_record).

Adding the CNAME to Phanfare

Once the CNAME has been created with your domain registrar, you need to tell Phanfare what hostname we should expect in the HTTP requests to our servers.

1. Login to Phanfare's web client (http://www.phanfare.com/login.aspx).
2. Click settings on the header.
3. Click site properties.
4. On the left side, under CNAME (URL Masking), enter your CNAME host name there.
5. Save.

Gotchas

• You can not frame or mask a Phanfare page in any other way than using a CNAME or the navigation will not work properly.
• Using a DNS A record will work, but require that you hardwire the IP address of albums.phanfare.com to your record, an IP address that may change from time to time. Hence, it is not recommended.
• DNS can take time to propagate, especially if you change an existing record in your domain versus create a new one.

Requirements

You must own and control the internet domain and be able to create CNAME DNS records within the domain. Phanfare does not register domains.

You must be a Phanfare Pro customer. Phanfare Premium customers must upgrade to Pro to have access to the CNAME features.