Hosting on a custom domain

You can send your newsletter emails from a custom domain, or a unique website address that's in line with your brand. The domain name appears in the address bar of each web page under that domain. It identifies those pages as part of the same site.

There's no security or performance benefit from hosting your newsletter on a custom domain. But it can help associate your newsletter with an existing brand, and we can all admit it's a little impressive. this-week-in-poetry.com is simply a cooler domain than this-week-in-poetry.buttondown.com or buttondown.com/this-week-in-poetry.

If you want to establish your newsletter as an independent entity, not simply a "Buttondown newsletter," setting up a custom domain to host it on makes a lot of sense.

1. If you're not signed up for either the Standard or Professional plan, upgrade your account.
2. Go to the Domains page.
3. Specify your domain name in the "Hosting domain" field.
4. Click Save changes.

The hosting domain should be a custom subdomain, such as newsletter.janedoe.com, and that the sending domain should be domain.com. The sending domain should match the custom email you have set.

After you change the hosting domain, the text box prompts you to change the CNAME record of the domain you'd like to use as your custom domain and provides you with a CNAME: custom-domains.buttondown.com.

Hosting on a custom domain means using a domain other than buttondown.com to host your newsletter and archives. For example: newsletter.example.com

Sending from a custom domain means setting up your DNS records so that Buttondown sends outgoing emails from your domain, improving reputation and delivery metrics.

Hosting requires you to sign up for either Standard or Professional plans. Sending from a custom domain is available to everyone. This is because, well, sending emails that actually get delivered is pretty important, and it's scummy to hide that behind a paywall.

This isn't possible to do in the UI, but you can still do it! Contact us and we'll get it wired up for you!

Unfortunately, some DNS providers do not let you set up the exact same domain or subdomain for both sending emails and as your custom archive.

For these DNSes, we recommend setting up completely separate subdomains. Try something like this:

• newsletter.janedoe.com for your custom newsletter domain, where folks view archives and subscribe to your newsletter
• mail.janedoe.com for your custom sending domain, where outgoing emails come from

This is the best option to preserve the deliverability of your newsletter.

graph TD
    example.com[example.com] -->|CNAME| custom-domains.buttondown.com
    custom-domains.buttondown.com -->|CNAME| buttondown.com

If you've got an old CNAME record ending in herokudns.com, please change it to custom-domains.buttondown.com. We plan on deprecating your existing CNAME records in the next few months, though will reach out to you before we do so.