Your site is live on a free subdomain and you want it at yourname.com instead. Connecting a domain means telling the internet's directory that your name should point at the servers holding your files, which takes two DNS records copied from your sofast dashboard into your registrar's control panel. The SSL certificate is issued automatically once the records are in place, so there is nothing to buy or install. Most of the work is finding the DNS panel; the rest is copy and paste.
What you need first
A published site. Your custom domain points at something that already exists. If you have not uploaded yet, do that first — publish your site.
A domain you own, with login access to the registrar. Not just the receipt — the account.
A plan. Every plan includes a custom domain, from $5 a month billed yearly — see the plans.
Add the domain on the sofast side
Open the site in your dashboard, go to Domains, and type your domain without https:// and without a trailing slash — just yourname.com.
sofast then shows you the records to create. Leave that screen open in a tab. You are about to copy values that have to match exactly, and retyping from memory is how this goes wrong.
Add the records at your registrar
Log in where you bought the domain and find the DNS settings. Every registrar names this differently — DNS Management, Advanced DNS, Nameservers, Zone Editor. You are looking for a table with columns like Type, Name, Value and TTL.
Then, for each record sofast gave you:
Check whether a record with that name already exists. New domains usually ship with a record pointing at the registrar's parking page. If one exists with the same Type and Name, edit it rather than adding a second — two records for the same name is the single most common failure here.
Copy the value exactly. Including any trailing dot, which some registrars require and others add for you. Copy and paste; do not retype.
Leave TTL at the default unless you have a reason. TTL — Time To Live — is how long other servers cache the answer.
Save.
Back in sofast, the domain shows as pending until the records are visible, then switches to active. The SSL certificate is issued at that point, automatically.
A DNS record is a line in the internet's phone book saying "this name goes to this address."
The apex and www question
Two versions of your domain exist: yourname.com, the apex, and www.yourname.com.
Set up both. People type both, and links in the wild use both. If only one works, some portion of your visitors get an error and quietly assume the site is down.
sofast gives you records for both, and serves one as the canonical version with the other redirecting to it — so you are not competing with yourself in search results.
What to do while you wait
Usually minutes. Sometimes hours, because DNS answers are cached around the world and not every cache expires at once. The documented range from major DNS providers runs from a few minutes to 48 hours.
Two things that look like failures and are not. Your site may load for a colleague and not for you — normal, mid-propagation. And your own browser may still be showing the parking page from cache — check in a private window before concluding anything.
If nothing has changed after 48 hours, the records are wrong rather than slow. The usual causes: a duplicate record still pointing at the parking page, a value with a typo, or records added at a registrar that is no longer managing the domain's DNS because the nameservers were pointed elsewhere.
Common questions
The five answers below cover subdomains, agencies holding client domains, email, multiple domains and reversibility.
No. It keeps working alongside your custom domain. Anything you shared with the subdomain address stays valid indefinitely.
Yes, and this is the normal arrangement for agency work. You need access to their DNS panel, or you send them the two records and they add them. The domain stays in the client's name, which is usually what both sides want.
Managing client sites →No. Email uses MX records, which are separate from the records you are adding. As long as you edit or add only the records sofast gave you and leave MX records alone, email is unaffected.
Yes. Add each one and create its records. All of them will open the same site. This is common when you own a .com and a .co and want both to land in the same place.
Change the DNS records to point elsewhere. Your domain is not locked to sofast at any point, and your files remain downloadable from your dashboard. Leaving takes about as long as arriving did.
Every plan includes a custom domain, from $5 a month billed yearly.