Most hosted discourse instances are on a subdomain:
forum.example.com
talk.example.com
www.example.com
This is our general recommendation in almost all cases, and it works great. However, if you wish to use a root domain or apex domain for your hosted discourse, like so
example.com
this turns out to be surprisingly difficult in a hosting scenario, due to the vagaries of how DNS works. 
It is possible, however, you must use a DNS provider that specifically supports it!
DNS provider documentation
Here is a list of known-compatible DNS providers, the name of the DNS type that you should use, and a link to their docs.
| Provider | Type |
|---|---|
| AWS Route53 (AWS only[1]) | A & AAAA ALIAS records; click for example → |
| CloudFlare | CNAME flattening · Cloudflare DNS docs |
| DNSimple | ALIAS |
| DNS Made Easy | ANAME |
| DreamHost | ALIAS |
| easyDNS | ANAME |
| Gandi | ALIAS |
| Hurricane Electric | ALIAS |
| Name | ANAME |
| Namecheap | ALIAS |
| Webcentral (formerly Netregistry) | Cloaked Redirection (IPv4 only) |
| PointDNS | ALIAS |
If your DNS provider is not one of the above, you must switch to one of these DNS providers to achieve an apex domain or root domain hosted discourse.
If you try/test out another DNS provider and it works for you, do reply here with the name of the DNS provider, and a link that explains how they set it up, so we can update our list. There are a lot of DNS providers, so we update the list as we find, this list is by no way a one-stop-list of every DNS provider in the world that supports this.
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this only works if you are self-hosted in AWS or on our AWS Enterprise Hosting ↩︎
Last edited by @dax 2026-03-13T11:58:09Z
Last checked by @MarkDoerr 2026-02-11T01:10:30Z
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