Use your own domain with our services

How to use your own domain with our services.

How? Well, that's easy. First off, you have to buy your own domain. If you already have a domain, you can skip this step.

Don't want to bother going through this? We offer free subdomains, check out our subdomains article. We set them up for you free of charge.

Already know what your doing? Check out our article for advanced users.

How to get your own domain

Getting a domain is easy, and can be bought from a lot of places on the internet. In 2022 (as of this writing), there are TONS of domain registrars (places you can get domains). The most cheapest around is NameCheap, though you may want to do your own research before getting the domain you want to buy.

There are various domain endings like .com, .org, .co.uk, .mc, etc, etc. We'll let you do your own research, but you could start with comparison websites such as TLD-List or domcomp. In this example, we'll use TLD-List.

Enter the domain you want to get in this box. You can even just enter the name of your domain without the ending if your not too sure.

You should be able to look at all the available options and choose what you prefer. Just note that not all registrars provide the same domain management features.

Also, for the sake of privacy, make sure that the domain registrar your going with has WHOIS protection. WHOIS is a public database that shows information about a domain such as info about the domain owner: their e-mail address, sometimes address, etc. WHOIS guard protects your information from being displayed on a public database by shielding your info with protected details.

How to use your own domain with our services

For the sake of convenience, we've added 2 methods on this page to use a custom domain.

The following method below is quick, and the other method (which is below the first method), is a little longer and may be a little confusing if you don't know what you're doing.

Quick: Add a SRV record via Cloudflare

Replace 'servername' with what you want, e.g. you'd enter play for play.example.org, port with your server port, and target with your server domain (you can find this on the game panel dashboard homepage).

And then voila, your server has now got a custom domain. You can connect to your server to whatever you set servername to. If your domain is example.org for example, you'd connect to your server by connecting to servername.example.org

Of course, servername is customizable to whatever you want.

Replace 'servername' with what you want, e.g. play.example.org, port with your port, and target with your server domain (you can find this on the game panel dashboard homepage).

Other method: Custom branding (in a sense)

This method would (in a sense) be used to prevent people from seeing what hosting provider you would use.

Of course, there's many other ways to trackback a hosting provider, and may not be 100% successful in doing this.

We're not against that: this method is just here because some people just generally prefer to do this over the other method. It is longer, though. And there is a drawback if our IP changes because of updates to our hosting.

First, your going to want to get the IP address of what node your on.

Step 1: Get what domain we're on

If we go on the Game Panel, we can see that our server is on eu1.skylarnodes.net

Now we've got our domain, move to Step 2.

Under 'IP' on the game panel home page, before you click on your server.

Step 2: Get IP from domain

To get the IP from the domain so we can use it with our custom domain, ping it using command prompt by doing ping [node domain], so for us it'd be ping eu1.skylarnodes.net or go to https://check-host.net/ip-info and put the domain in there to get the IP.

Now we've got the IP is 51.83.184.102, we can move onto the next step.

Now we've got the IP of the server, we can create a record for our domain.

For Minecraft servers

If this is too difficult, you may want to get a free subdomain or contacting us for help. Every domain registrar have their own DNS. If it doesn't make any sense, we recommend switching to Cloudflare. (It's free!)

Just note, if your using Cloudflare's DNS, make the records under the GREY CLOUD (DNS Only), NOT the orange cloud!

Basically, proxy status has to be DNS Only. See the image below.

Your going to want to add a new DNS records to your own domain.

An A record with the following (replacing example.org with your domain name):

Type	A
Name	server.example.org
TTL	3600 / Automatic TTL
Address	The node IP of your server

Note: server.example.org is not where you would connect to your server. This is something that needs to be here for your own domain to work.

A SRV record with the following (replacing example.org with your domain name, and server port with your game server port):

Type	SRV
Name	_minecraft._tcp.play.example.org
TTL	3600
Priority & Weight	0
Port	your server port
Target	server.example.org

Where it says 'name', play.example.org is where people would connect to.

And that's how you add your own domain!

Of course, server and play can be changeable to whatever you want.