Introduction
Whenever you create an event with Grenadine Event Manager, an event micro-website is created as soon as you hit the Publish button. This website can be used by attendees and participants to view your event schedule, your list of speakers, and to register for your event. Once registered, attendees and participants are able to log on to build their schedule, update their public profile or answer surveys.
When we create your website, we use a grenadine address in the form:
https://sites.grenadine.co/sites/your-company/your-event-name
Your event website is created instantly and is automatically fully functional.
To meet the needs of our enterprise customers, we offer the ability to publish your event website under a custom domain. A custom domain is an add-on that allows you to publish websites under your own domain.
How to Use Your Custom Domain
Let’s say that your company is called Gamers United and the domain you use to host your website is “gamersunited.com”. A DNS server has been set up for you that directs to your main website, perhaps hosted under WordPress or Drupal or something similar.
Your company hosts an annual gamers convention called “International Gamer’s Convention”. For this year’s edition, the event will be imaginatively called “2023 International Gamer’s Convention“.
Here’s an example of how you could use Grenadine to host your instantly-generated event website under your gamersconvention.com custom domain.
1. Pick a subdomain to point to your events website
You could choose “events.gamersunited.com” or “activities.gamersunited.com“. In the example below, we’ll choose “events.gamersunited.com” to generate websites which attendees and participants can access.
2. Contact the Grenadine support team
Contact our support team and let us know that you are interested in the custom domain option and inform us of the domain you would like to use for your next event (in our example it’s events.gamersunited.com).
3. Add a DNS record (or call your techie to do it!)
In this step, you’ll receive special instructions from Grenadine. Our support team will ask you to add a CNAME record to your DNS hosting server. Here’s an example of the CNAME record for the Gamer’s United events website domain:
| NAME | TYPE | VALUE |
|---|---|---|
| events.gamersunited.com | CNAME | enterprise.grenadine.co |
4. Use your new domain!
As soon as your CNAME record takes effect, your new address will point to your Grenadine event website. Here’s what your old URL was, and what the new one looks like:
| Old URL | https://sites.grenadine.co/sites/gamers-anonymous/2018-gamersconvention |
| New URL | https://events.gamersunited.com/sites/gamers-anonymous/2018-gamersconvention |
Note that your new URL is full secured with an https:// prefix. For securing your custom site, we use Let’s Encrypt and we generate an SSL certificate for you.