If you're using Shorthand hosting and want to dedicate a subdomain of a domain you already own to your Shorthand stories, you will need to be able to edit CNAME and DNS records listed with your domain registrar (the entity from which you purchased the domain).

Note: Shorthand hosting ordinarily does not allow publishing to root/apex domains like yourdomain.com because DNS rules don't allow a CNAME to coexist with the other records and services commonly tied to the root, for instance MX records and email wouldn't work. This means you will ordinarily need to publish to a subdomain like www.yourdomain.com or stories.yourdomain.com when using Shorthand hosting for a custom domain.

If your DNS provider supports using root domains as CNAMEs via special configurations like CNAME Flattening/ALIAS/ANAME records, you may request a special configuration setup by contacting Shorthand support with the name of your DNS provider.

There are many different domain registrars and the method for adding or changing the CNAME records will depend on the provider you use.

We have compiled a list of some popular domain registrars. Please find yours in this list and refer to their support page:

Please note: Some domain registrars may not support the use of an underscore when entering CNAME records. If this is the case, you will need to contact your DNS provider’s support team for assistance to enter the relevant CNAME record.

DNS validation for domains registered with GoDaddy and other registries may fail unless you modify the CNAME values provided by ACM. More information here.
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Can't see your provider? Get in touch with us for further advice.

The second CNAME entry provides DNS validation to AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), so that it can verify that you own the domain name before it creates the certificate used for HTTPS connections. Without the second entry, ACM will not automatically verify that you possess the domain, it will not present a SSL certificate for your domain, and browsers will be unable to connect to your website.
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This page has a good explanation on ACM, including its DNS Validation feature: https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/faqs/
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Please note the second entry also enables ACM to auto renew — if you really don't wish to do this, then we can manually configure the ACM to do email validation but you (as the domain owner) would have to manually validate via an email link whenever it is about to expire. We generally don't advise this as more often than not, the renewal is forgotten or accidentally missed until someone notices the site isn't working per normal.

If you have a CAA record configured, you will need to add at least one of the 4 Amazon CA for ACM certificate issuance and auto renewal to work as mentioned in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm/latest/userguide/setup-caa.html