APIs & Integrations

markdhansen
Participant

Why Can't CMS (COS) Pages Be Hosted On Root Domain?

WHY? What are the technical reasons that HubSpot cannot host content on the root domain?

TL;DR Details

I'm moving my company website to HubSpot COS. All our content is hosted on the root domain: https://foobar.com

So, now we are going to have to implement redirects

foobar.com --> www.foobar.com
foobar.com/blog --> blog.foobar.com
foobar.com/support --> support.foobar.com

My developers are not at all happy about this. They think it is a ridiculous constraint by HubSpot to not support content on the root domain.

So, can someone explain to me WHY it is impossible? What's up with the HubSpot infrastructure that makes this impossible?

7 Replies 7
dsavage
Participant

Why Can't CMS (COS) Pages Be Hosted On Root Domain?

I'm also running into this issue.  I have a client who no longer has access to their previous web host and just wants to start from scratch on CMS.  Unfortunately, I can't update their A records to their CMS-hosted site because apparently that's not an option.  So now any link to their site without the "www" subdomain is broken.

0 Upvotes
Deee
Participant

Why Can't CMS (COS) Pages Be Hosted On Root Domain?

Hello, just adding an extra reply as I would like to see root domains being available on HubSpot too. About time to have this option and move away from subdomains. 

RKamat
Participant

Why Can't CMS (COS) Pages Be Hosted On Root Domain?

We just created our entire site only to find out that I cannot make entries in the DNS to change the A record as no IP is provided. I am not sure if Hubspot still only wants sub domains to be hosted on their service while the primary website should be outside Hubspot.

0 Upvotes
markdhansen
Participant

Why Can't CMS (COS) Pages Be Hosted On Root Domain?

Jeff,

Thanks for your explanation. It makes sense and it's very helpful to me to be able to pass along to my developers.

Can you tell me more, or provide a link that describes the "service to automatically redirect your root domain paths to www domains"? Does this redirect HTTPS as well as HTTP? (see the other question I posted today: HTTPS Redirect To HubSpot - What is Best Practice?)

Mark

0 Upvotes
boulter
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

Why Can't CMS (COS) Pages Be Hosted On Root Domain?

No problem. Your CSM or anyone in support can setup your portal to allow apex domain redirection. It redirects only HTTP since we can't provision SSL for a domain we don't control.

0 Upvotes
Espinal
Participant

Why Can't CMS (COS) Pages Be Hosted On Root Domain?

Boulter, I am starting hubspot onboarding an I have gotten to conclusión that  using subdomains to publish the blogs is undesirable because it will impact google rankings.

 

At the moment our blog is inside root domain, given 2 year since you answered this, please advice if nowadays there is a way for hubbspot to publish the blogs inside our wordpress instance (root domain).  https://itksoluciones.com/blog-section-controlcombustible/

boulter
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

Why Can't CMS (COS) Pages Be Hosted On Root Domain?

Hi there,

It's definitely not ideal that you can't host content on the root domain, especially for migrating sites. The reasons we don't currently support it are partially due to internet infrastructure and partially due to reliability concerns.

We rely on CNAME chains to route domains to our servers. Unfortunately the DNS specification does not allow CNAME for root domains. There are ANAMEs which do allow CNAMEs for root domains, but that's supported by very few DNS providers.

The alternative to CNAMEs is just using IPs which DO work for root domains. The issue with IPs is that if they are DDoSed, then customers have to update their DNS to switch to a new IP to restore their site. Since it's not feasible to give every customer their own unique (v4) IPs (or set of IPs), a single DDoSed IP could take down many sites. In fact, many years ago we used to give out IPs, and we suffered this exact situation.

We do offer a service to automatically redirect your root domain paths to www domains so you don't have to set those up manually with another hosting provider.

We're also investigating new tricks that may allow hosting on the root domain, but we don't have a timeline for that at this time.