# Test environment domain

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-environment-domain/74132>\
**Category:** Self-hosting\
**Tags:** hosting\
**Created:** [November 15, 2017, 8:10pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-environment-domain/74132 "2017-11-15T20:10:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![communitygal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/communitygal/32/80177_2.png) [@communitygal](https://meta.discourse.org/u/communitygal)\
**Post date:** [November 15, 2017, 8:10pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-environment-domain/74132/1 "2017-11-15T20:10:09Z")

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Hi all,

It’s time for me to set up my subscription. This instance I’ll be setting up is going to be for our test environment. I know I need to point it to a domain we own, but I don’t want it to be searchable or crawled.

Would you recommend we buy a random domain for our test instance? We bought many domains but we don’t want them to come up in search.

Thanks,  
Emma

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)\
**Post date:** [November 15, 2017, 9:34pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-environment-domain/74132/2 "2017-11-15T21:34:14Z")

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It just depends on how paranoid you want to be. If you require logins and disable searches, not much will escape. `test.example.com` is reasonably safe. If someone were to stumble on it, they’d see that there was Discourse running there, but not much else.

If you are going to be hosted at `discourse.org`, it’s rather moot. You can just choose a random word that’ll show up on their test domain (something like `random.trydiscourse.org`).

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![communitygal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/communitygal/32/80177_2.png) [@communitygal](https://meta.discourse.org/u/communitygal)\
**Post date:** [November 15, 2017, 9:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/test-environment-domain/74132/3 "2017-11-15T21:37:15Z")

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thanks for your response!