Connect Your Domain to Rhythm

Connect your website domain to Rhythm to publish your content on Rhythm-hosted portals and microsites. Connecting to your domain will also allow you to send emails to your constituents from the Rhythm platform.

Table of Contents

• Before You Get Started
• DNS Configuration Spreadsheet
• General DNS Instructions
• Verifying Your New DNS Records
• Changing Your Domains

Before You Get Started

• To connect your domain, you will need to update your DNS records. Ensure you have login details for your DNS provider and access to the DNS records.
• It's recommended to take a screenshot of your DNS settings before making any changes.
• If you need additional assistance making changes to your DNS records, reach out to your DNS provider's support team.

DNS Configuration Spreadsheet

Once you have identified the domains you would like to use for your portals and microsites, our team will create an SSL certificate. After that's done, our team will share a Google spreadsheet that will include all of the necessary information to help you prepare for setup. We need to configure the following:

• Primary Domain Records: Redirects users to your portal and microsites
• Domain Verification: Verifies ownership of the domain
• Email Verification: Verifies that Rhythm is allowed to send emails on behalf of your domain and assists with spam filtering

General DNS Instructions

Below are general instructions to update your DNS records. Field names may vary from provider to provider, for example, host, name, and alias may describe the same field depending on the provider. To update your DNS records:

• Log in to your DNS provider account, such as GoDaddy or Google.
• Locate the existing CNAME record for the subdomain you're connecting or create a new one.
• In the host, name, or alias field, enter the prefix for your subdomain (portal, members, events). 
  
  Helpful Hint: Some providers will add your brand domain to the end of DNS records automatically. For example, if you enter {domainkey}.yourdomain.org, it will turn that value to {domainkey}.yourdomain.org.yourdomain.org, which will result in an invalid DNS record. Instead, copy the value but remove the .yourdomain.org part, then paste into the corresponding field in your DNS provider account. 
• In the target, value, or points to field, paste the CNAME record value you copied from your DNS Configuration Spreadsheet. 
• If your provider allows you to set a custom TTL, do so.
  
  Helpful Hint: Set a reasonably low value for the TTL. We recommend using the lowest value your DNS provider will allow between five minutes and one hour. The reasoning? If we need to change any of these records during implementation, we don't want to wait a long time for the updates to propagate. 
• Create records for all of the items in your DNS Configuration Spreadsheet.

Verifying Your New DNS Records

Once you have created your new DNS records, you will need to verify them. You should be able to do this within an hour of creating them. You can use any DNS lookup tool to complete this, we used MxToolbox in our example.

• Copy a DNS record name from your DNS Configuration Spreadsheet and paste it into the lookup tool.
• The results should return the given CNAME and its corresponding record value in the DNS Configuration Spreadsheet.

Changing Your Domains

If your domains or subdomains change, we will need to issue a new certificate with the updated information. This isn't a big deal, but does require some time to process and can delay things - so we'd like to avoid it if possible. Be certain of the domains and subdomains you need.