What are Custom Domains?
Custom Domains is the single place in Atender to map your own hostnames — like help.example.com or status.example.com — to the Atender surfaces that customers see. Configure once, point DNS, and Atender provisions the TLS certificate for you.
What this surface controls
The Custom Domains page covers two customer-facing surfaces and only those two:
- Knowledge Base portal —
help.example.com,support.example.com,docs.example.com - Status page —
status.example.com,health.example.com,uptime.example.com
Each entry in the page belongs to one of these two products. You pick which one when you add the domain.
It does not cover the agent app login URL, the Web Chat widget, your email sending domain (that’s a separate flow), the public Incidents portal embed scripts, or anything else. See Which Atender surfaces can have custom domains? for the full map.
How it works
Atender’s edge is fronted by a domain-mapping provider (Approximated) that handles the routing and TLS provisioning. The flow is the same for every domain you add:
- You declare the domain in Atender. Pick the product (KB or Status), enter the hostname, save.
- Atender returns the DNS records to add. Usually a single A record pointing to the edge cluster IP, plus one or two domain-control verification (DCV) records — typically TXT or CNAME — that the certificate provider uses to confirm you own the domain.
- You add those records at your DNS provider. Cloudflare, Route 53, GoDaddy, your registrar’s panel — wherever your DNS lives.
- Atender polls and provisions. Status moves from Awaiting DNS → Issuing certificate → Active. The TLS certificate is issued and renewed automatically; you don’t bring your own cert.
There’s no on-premise install, no reverse proxy you have to run, no certificate renewal to remember. The edge provider handles serving traffic and rotating certs.
Subdomains only
Atender supports custom domains on subdomains (help.example.com) but not on apex domains (the bare example.com). This is a limitation of how the edge provider routes traffic. Use a subdomain for every custom domain you add.
Limits
Each tenant can have up to 20 custom domains in total, with at most 10 in a pending state at any one time (Awaiting DNS or Issuing certificate). Once domains move to Active, they don’t count against the pending cap. If you hit the pending cap, finish setting up DNS on the existing pending domains before adding more.
Who can manage Custom Domains
The page is gated by the Custom Domains permission. Owner has it by default; other roles need it explicitly granted. The setting is tenant-wide — everyone on your tenant sees the same set of domains and shares the same limits.
What changes for end users
Once a domain is Active, your customers can:
- Knowledge Base — visit
help.example.cominstead of the default Atender tenant URL. Article links keep working; the slug structure is the same on both URLs. - Status page — visit
status.example.cominstead of the default. Incidents, components, and the subscriber dialog are served identically.
The default Atender URLs continue to work too — adding a custom domain doesn’t disable the default URL, it just adds your domain as an additional entry point.