Help

A published participant portal is served on a hostname you own — panel.acme.com, members.acme.com, or your apex domain. You bring the domain and add two DNS records; SurveyAnalytica handles the routing, the HTTPS certificate and the tenant boundary. This guide walks through adding the domain, the records, what the two status labels mean, mapping teams, and connecting the domain to a portal.

What you need

Access to your DNS provider — Cloudflare, Route 53, GoDaddy, Namecheap or similar.
A hostname you control. A subdomain such as panel.acme.com is the usual choice, but the apex (acme.com) is supported too.
A plan that includes custom domains. Without it the form answers “Your current plan does not include custom domains.”
Organization administrator rights.

Hostnames under surveyanalytica.com and tangigo.com are reserved and cannot be registered — the form answers “This domain is reserved and cannot be used”. The shared preview host is for previewing a draft only; it never serves a customer portal and does not accept sign-ups.

The flow at a glance

Two records at your DNS provider, then one selection in the portal’s Branding panel.

Step 1 — Add the domain

Open Account → My Domains.
Select the Participant Panel tab — “Serve the participant portal on your own custom domain (e.g. panel.yourcompany.com).”
Type the full hostname into the field and click Add Domain.

A hostname belongs to one organization globally. If someone else has already registered it you will see “Cannot add domain — it’s already claimed by another account.” Contact support if that hostname is genuinely yours.

The domain now appears as a card. It has two independent checks to pass, and the card tells you which one it is waiting on.

Step 2 — Prove you own it

While ownership is unproven the card reads Domain is pending verification and, when a challenge is required, shows the exact record to create:

“Add the following TXT record on acme.com to prove ownership of panel.acme.com:”

A small table gives Type, Name and Value; every cell is click-to-copy. Copy each one exactly — a trailing space or a truncated token is the usual reason verification never completes. Note that the record goes on the apex of your zone, even when the hostname you are registering is a subdomain.

Step 3 — Point the traffic at the portal

Once ownership is settled the card shows a routing status: Valid Configuration in green when traffic will reach the portal, or Invalid Configuration in red when it will not. While it is invalid the card shows two buttons — CNAME Record (subdomains) and A Record (apex domain) — above the instruction “Set the following record on your DNS provider to continue:”.

Use whichever record matches the hostname you registered, and copy the value from your own domain card — the values above are the common defaults, not a guarantee.

Always copy the value from the card rather than from documentation. The card shows what the platform is currently advertising for your domain, and that is the value that will pass the check.

Step 4 — Wait for the checks to pass

There is no Verify button to hunt for: the card re-checks the domain by itself — when you open the screen, every half-minute while you watch it, and whenever you press Reload. As soon as your DNS change has propagated, the labels flip on their own, usually within a minute or so of the change reaching public resolvers. Propagation itself is up to your provider and your record’s TTL, and can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a few hours.

Any error your DNS provider or the routing layer reports is shown on the card verbatim, so you can see exactly what is still missing.

HTTPS

The certificate is issued and renewed for you as soon as the domain routes correctly. There is nothing to upload, nothing to renew, and no certificate settings to configure — your portal is always served over HTTPS.

Step 5 — Choose which teams the domain serves

Once the domain is both verified and correctly configured, a workspace selector appears on its card. This is what scopes the portal’s content: the teams you pick here decide whose participant-visible surveys the portal serves. Leave it as it is for a single-team organization; use it when you want different domains to serve different audiences — a customer portal on one hostname, an employee hub on another, inside the same organization.

A domain mapped to an empty team list shows nothing at all. If a portal comes up bare after a domain change, check this selector first.

Step 6 — Connect the domain to a portal

Registering a domain does not by itself serve anything. Open the portal in Account → Portal Designs, go to the Branding panel, and choose the hostname under Panel domain. The panel then confirms “Portal served at your domain“. The same dropdown offers + Add new domain if you need to register one first.

The relationship is one to one: a portal serves a single domain, and a domain is claimed by a single portal. Trying to reuse a hostname another portal already holds is refused. An organization can of course register several domains and run a portal on each.

With the domain selected, two portal settings become available — Allow self-registration in the Branding panel and Auto-approve sign-ups in the Settings popover. Both are per portal and both take effect immediately, without republishing.

Participants can only sign themselves up on your own custom domain. Until a domain is mapped, the only way onto a portal is for an administrator to add the participant.

Replacing or removing a domain

The Delete action on the domain card removes it: the claim is released, the routing is torn down, and the hostname becomes available again. You can then clean up the records at your DNS provider. There is no in-place edit — replacing a domain means deleting the old one and adding the new one, then re-selecting it in the portal’s Branding panel.

A portal whose domain has been removed keeps its design and history but is no longer reachable, and publishing it again will be refused until a domain is mapped.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	What to check
Still “Domain is pending verification” after an hour	Look up the TXT record with a public DNS lookup tool. It has to sit on the apex of the zone, and the value must match character for character. Some providers append the zone name to the record name for you — check you have not ended up with the name twice.
Invalid Configuration that will not clear	You may have created the wrong record type: a CNAME for a subdomain, an A record for an apex. A conflicting existing record on the same name — a stale A record where a CNAME should be, or a proxied entry at your provider — will also block it.
“This domain is reserved and cannot be used”	The hostname is under a platform-reserved domain. Use a hostname on your own domain.
“Cannot add domain — it’s already claimed by another account”	Another organization registered it first. Choose a different hostname, or contact support if it is yours.
“Your current plan does not include custom domains.”	Custom domains are a paid capability. Upgrade the plan or contact your account manager.
The domain loads a SurveyAnalytica page instead of your portal	The hostname is not resolving to a registered portal. Confirm the domain card is green and that the domain is selected in the portal’s Panel domain field, then publish the portal.
The portal is empty on the new domain	Check the workspace selector on the domain card — an empty team list serves nothing.

Next step

With the domain green, build the portal that will live on it: Building Your Portal — Design Tabs, Components and Branding, then Publishing and Launching Your Participant Portal. For the wider picture, see Participant Portal — Overview and Use Cases.