Setting up a custom domain on PythonAnywhere

If you have a paid account on PythonAnywhere, you can set up websites on a custom domain -- that is, a domain that is not your-username.pythonanywhere.com.

If you don't own a domain name of your own and want to have a second website as a subdomain of our domain, check out our help page on Using Custom PythonAnywhere Subdomains.

There are three steps to getting a site running on your own custom domain:

  1. (if you haven't already), purchase a domain name from a domain name registrar.
  2. Create a new entry on the Web tab for your new domain
  3. Create a CNAME record with your domain provider, pointing at the new website

There are two optional, but recommended steps, to make your site secure. Do these after you've done the steps above:

  1. Set up an HTTPS/SSL certificate
  2. Force HTTPS on your website

Purchasing a domain name

We don't recommend any particular domain registrar, they're all pretty similar. Just google around, compare prices (they should all be very similar), and pick the one that seems to have the friendliest user interface.

Creating a PythonAnywhere website for your new domain

For best performance and reliability on PythonAnywhere, we strongly recommend that you use a CNAME to point your domain at our servers. Without going too much into the technical details, a CNAME means that you don't need to do any DNS configuration beyond the initial setup; we can manage everything for you, so if (for example) the IP address associated with your website gets blocked in some country, or if it's subjected to a denial-of-service attack, we can move your website over to a different IP address without you needing to do anything.

The one restriction that CNAMEs have is that they cannot be used for "naked" or "apex" domains. To make that more concrete, you can use www.yourdomain.com or somethingelse.yourdomain.com for the website, but not yourdomain.com. But that doesn't have to be a problem; you can host your site on www.yourdomain.com and then set things up so that people who visit yourdomain.com are automatically redirected to www.yourdomain.com. There's more information on that last bit later on.

Given all that, here's how to create the website:

If you don't have a website for it yet

Just click the "Add a new web app" button on the Web tab. In the first step, it will ask you for the domain name to use. You should specify the fully-qualified domain name -- that is, www.yourdomain.com, not just yourdomain.com. Next go on to choose your Python version, framework and so on.

If you already have a website that you want to use

This help page explains how to use a new domain for existing website, for example if the site you want to show is currently displayed at jane.pythonanywhere.com, and you want it to appear at www.yourdomain.com. Once again, you should specify the fully-qualified domain name -- that is, www.yourdomain.com rather than yourdomain.com.

Configuring the domain at the domain registrar

Once you've purchased your domain and created the new website config on PythonAnywhere, you'll want to find the configuration screen on your domain provider that allows you to set up a CNAME record.

The CNAME record will point www.yourdomain.com to the value specified on the "Web" tab for your application; this value will be of the form webapp-XXXX.pythonanywhere.com where XXXX is some number or other (unless your site is set up to support legacy versions of TLS, in which case it will be the value from that page). Setting up this kind of record tells the domain name system that when someone asks for your website, they should get it from one of the servers that make up PythonAnywhere.

Note: your website itself will not show up at the webapp-XXXX.pythonanywhere.com address. It's just an identifier for a server.

CNAME records have two parts. The Alias and the Canonical Name. The alias in this case should be www. The address should be the value from the "Web" tab -- the one like webapp-XXXX.pythonanywhere.com.

Different DNS providers call them different things.

  • Alias: domain name, alias name, host, or just "name"
  • Canonical Name: the address, FQDN, Fully Qualified Domain Name, points to, or Host Name.

Specifically, if you're using GoDaddy, the alias is called "name", and the canonical name is called "data".

If you're using OVH as your registrar, you may also see that they've automatically created a TXT record for www.yourdomain.com with a value of "3|welcome" -- you'll need to delete that, as a domain can't have both a TXT record and a CNAME.

See here for more information about how DNS works.

Notes for specific DNS providers

Here's how to set up a CNAME for some popular registrars:

Testing your configuration

CNAME changes can take a little while to propagate from your registrar to the rest of the Internet. You can see whether the change has reached PythonAnywhere yet by looking at the site on the "Web" page; it will show a warning if the CNAME it sees for your domain is not the one it expects.

You can also use this CNAME lookup tool if you want to get a second opinion: Enter your website's name (including the www. prefix) and select "CNAME" from the dropdown. It will check the CNAME from a bunch of different places around the Internet, which will give you a feel for how far the propagation has got.

If your CNAME is still not working after a couple of hours, you should double-check your setup. If it all looks OK, but the site isn't working, check out our DNS troubleshooting page.

Once you have website working, you should set up HTTPS. There are two steps to do for this:

  1. Set up an HTTPS/SSL certificate for your domain
  2. Force HTTPS on your website

Optional: Set up a naked domain redirect

Most people want their site set up so that when someone goes to http://yourdomain.com/ they are redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com/, or if they go to http://yourdomain.com/foo they are redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com/foo, and so on. Check out this help page for details on how to do that.

Still having trouble?

We have a separate page dedicated to handling specific problems -- 95% of DNS problems can be sorted quickly by following the instructions there.

If you still can't get it working, contact us -- please attach a screenshot of the DNS configuration you've set up on your registrar's site.