As part of your portal access setup, you can link a subdomain of your primary domain name to the OwnerRez servers and from then on the portal will "live" at your domain and portal users will log in to your branded domain rather than using the main OwnerRez URL. This is sometimes known as a "white-label" portal.
We'll also generate an HTTPS secured certificate and apply it for you (no charge, but requires a credit card on file for verification). This may take a few hours, or even overnight, after you follow the steps below to configure the DNS records with your domain registrar.
Configuration
To configure a branded subdomain, you'll need to do three things:
- Buy a domain name. If you don't have an account anywhere yet, we recommend Namecheap.
- Enter a subdomain in the "Branded Subdomain" your domain name in Branding area of Portal Access. This is found in PM > Portal Access. Click on the "Change Settings" button at the top. On the next page, enter a subdomain of your domain name. For example if your main site is
acmevacations.com, you might useportal.acmevacations.comorowners.acmevacations.com. - Update your DNS servers to point to portal.ownerrez.com as a CNAME.
- Come back to the Portal Access area in OwnerRez and use the Check DNS button to make sure that the DNS settings are configured correctly:
- Once you have configured the branded subdomain and set the DNS settings correctly, we'll automatically generate an HTTPS certificate. This process may take a couple of hours. Once complete, the status will change to Online.
Step three is the tricky part. The easiest thing to do is to contact support at your registrar, the place where you purchased your domain, and ask them to turn off any domain parking/forwarding and make the following change for you (substitute the portal name in red with whatever subdomain you choose, but leave it pointing to portal.ownerrez.com regardless of the subdomain name:
Create (or set if there is one already) a CNAME type record with a name of portal pointing to portal.ownerrez.com
Pitfalls and Gotchas
Do I need to configure Nameservers? No, you do NOT need to point nameservers at the IP addresses above. That is a separate configuration. You should make the updates to the DNS on your current nameserver, usually the one provided by your registrar.
If you have a custom nameserver set at your registrar, like Wix and other sites use, you can either add the records to their nameserver or if you're not using that anymore, switch back to your registrars nameservers.
If you're confused on this, contact support at your registrar -- they'll be able to help you get your nameserver configuration correct and apply the DNS settings above. You can point their support agents at this web page - they will know what it means and how to make it so. (Using the Chat feature with your registrar is often a good option. Just copy and paste all of the info from #3 above into the Chat session and the folks at Namecheap, GoDaddy, etc. can usually get you set up in no time.)
Confirmation
Once the configurations are in place, you can double-check that everything is correct using the Dig tool.
If you run into any issues setting up the branded subdomain, contact us and we'll help you get it all set up and configured properly. This will almost certainly involve your domain registrar, though, so you may get quicker results by going straight to them.