How to connect a custom domain to your website without paying markup fees

Connecting a domain you already own — yourbrand.com — to a site is one of the few steps that has to be exactly right. The value you type is the value that decides whether the site appears at all.

This is the whole procedure: one record, one value, and what happens on the other side of it.

The one record

A domain whose DNS is hosted somewhere else — Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Aliyun, Tencent — is connected with a CNAME. This is the record in full:

The same records, written the way a zone file writes them:

text
; the apex
yourbrand.com.        3600  IN  CNAME  sites.zeso.cc.
; www
www.yourbrand.com.    3600  IN  CNAME  sites.zeso.cc.

The target is a hostname, and it is the same one for every domain. There is no A record to look up and no edge IP to copy.

sites.zeso.cc is the platform's dedicated CNAME target — the address your record points at, and nothing else. It never renders a site by itself, and it never serves the platform's own pages. A domain pointed anywhere else, including at a host in the platform's own zone, will not resolve to your site.

The procedure

1. Open the DNS records for the domain. In your registrar's panel, find the zone the domain lives in and add a record. The name of that page differs by registrar; the fields below are the same everywhere.
2. Add the CNAME. Record type CNAME, host the name you want to serve (yourbrand.com at the root, or www), target sites.zeso.cc, TTL auto or 3600.
3. At the root, use your registrar's flattening alias. Most registrars will not take a CNAME at the root of a zone. Cloudflare applies the flattening itself; other registrars call it ALIAS, ANAME, or CNAME-at-root. The target is the same one. If your registrar has none of these, put the CNAME on www and point the root at it with an A record.
4. Attach the domain to the site. The record is half of it. A domain is served only once it is attached to a specific site, and the platform will not guess which one: a domain that resolves but is not attached returns nothing — not an error page, not the platform's home page, just a 404, because an unbound host is not a site.
5. Wait for the record to propagate. Propagation is the slow part and it announces itself. The attachment is the part that succeeds quietly and shows nothing, so attach the domain before you start waiting.
6. There is no certificate to obtain. Once the domain is attached, a certificate is issued for it and renewed automatically — no CSR to generate, no file to upload, nothing to renew by hand.

Checking that it took

Two commands, from anywhere, tell you whether the record is live:

bash
$ dig +short yourbrand.com CNAME
sites.zeso.cc.

$ dig +short www.yourbrand.com CNAME
sites.zeso.cc.

An empty answer means the record is not there yet — either it was typed wrong or it has not propagated. An answer that is not sites.zeso.cc. means the record is there and pointing somewhere it should not.

What it costs

Connecting a domain is part of the plan you are on; there is no separate connection fee, and the certificate comes with it.

Other builders put domain connection behind a paid plan. The comparison pages carry the price each one charges and the plan it is attached to.

A domain registered with us is a different route: the zone, the records and the certificate are created with it, and there is nothing to type.