Advanced Custom Domain Setup

Cut over traffic from your pre-existing web host to Ploy without downtime — through a staged, manual rollout.

This guide walks you through a series of manual setup steps that let you validate every Ploy configuration on a staging hostname before flipping production traffic. Once you're confident, you'll swap DNS at your registrar and your visitors will roll onto Ploy with zero downtime.

Create a Staging Domain

  1. Use Custom Domain Quick Setup to stage a pre-production domain such as v2.your-domain.com or www2.your-domain.com — whichever subdomain you can free up in your organization to serve as a playground for Ploy configurations.
  2. Once the Ploy site and any accompanying proxy and redirect rules are verified on this staging domain, move forward with migrating your important domains — such as www.your-company.com or your your-company.com apex domain.

Phased Rollout

  1. When presented with the DNS setup screen, manually configure only the _acme-challenge values. This is sufficient for Ploy's edge network to verify your domain ownership and begin the minutes-long process of issuing an SSL certificate.
  2. Work with your Ploy support team to verify that the SSL certificate has been issued.
  3. If you used a staging domain to configure the routing rules, manually transfer those rules over in the UI.
    1. If your routing rules exceed 5 items, contact Ploy support ahead of time — we can suggest ways to structure your site to ease the complexity.
  4. Now set the A 207.207.209.209 or CNAME proxy.runploy.com hostname records. In the minutes that follow, DNS resolvers across the internet will start to notice this change.
    1. When Ploy notices this change, we will mark the domain as Live in our system and begin serving traffic for users and browsers that resolve your domain to our IP or hostname. For the fastest go-live, keep the domain setup page in your Ploy dashboard open — Ploy watches for DNS changes in real time while that page is open. If you close it, liveness checks fall back to background polling every few minutes.
    2. Many users will have stale caches on their computers and home/corp networks and will continue to reach your old hosting provider. During this phase, we advise that you keep your old provider's content online so all users reach a valid page.
    3. You may continue to see old cached pages on your desktop browser for a while. Follow public instructions on clearing caches for macOS, Linux, Windows, and/or your browser (e.g. Chrome) if you keep loading the old site.