Custom domains
Point any domain you already own at your Lemonade Host site for 99¢ a month more. The certificate is included, and so are the exact records to add.
How it works
The active part takes a couple of minutes. The rest is just DNS catching up.
In your dashboard, type in the domain you already own — any domain, from any registrar. No transfer, no change of registrar, no waiting on a transfer lock to clear.
We show the exact values: an A record pointing the apex at our address, and a CNAME pointing www at your subdomain. Copy them into your registrar's DNS panel and save.
Usually minutes. DNS changes propagate through caches around the internet, so it can occasionally take longer — up to a day in rare cases — depending on your registrar and how long your previous records were cached.
The moment it resolves, a certificate is issued for the new domain, covering apex and www alike. Full detail on the SSL page.
Apex or www
Point the wrong one and only half your visitors land on your site. A domain has two common front doors: the bare apex (yourdomain.com, sometimes called the root or naked domain) and the www subdomain (www.yourdomain.com). Point either one at us and we redirect the other to it automatically, so a visitor lands in the same place no matter which they typed or which one an old link used. Skip the DNS record for one of them entirely, though, and that address simply won't resolve — it's the single most common setup mistake, and a one-line fix once you notice it.
Any registrar
The domain doesn't need to come from us, and it never has to move. GoDaddy, Namecheap, a registrar built into another host, a domain you registered years ago and forgot about — any of them work exactly the same way, because pointing a domain is just a couple of DNS records, not a transfer of ownership. You keep paying whoever you bought the domain from for the domain itself; the 99¢ add-on here only covers serving your site on it.
Changing your mind later is just as simple. Moving a domain to point somewhere else means changing those same two DNS records back — nothing about your domain registration changes, and nothing on our side needs cancelling first. The domain is yours the whole time; we're just where it happens to point today.
Common mistakes
A previous host's A record or CNAME still sitting in your DNS panel will conflict with the new one. Remove the old entry — don't just add ours alongside it.
If your domain's nameservers still point at a previous host's DNS service, editing records in your registrar's panel won't do anything — the records that matter live wherever the nameservers point.
DNS changes aren't instant everywhere at once. Give it the better part of a day before assuming something's wrong, especially if the domain was in active use somewhere else recently.
What it costs
The free subdomain isn't a downgrade — it's the same hosting, same SSL, same edge network. A custom domain is 99¢ more, added to the site you're already running.
The price doesn't change at renewal any more than the base plan's does, and the add-on can be removed the same way it was added — a setting, not a contract.
Worth knowing
No — the free you.lemonadehost.com subdomain gets identical hosting, SSL and CDN. A custom domain is an add-on for when you want your own address, not a requirement to get the rest of it.
Yes, any time — update the DNS records to wherever else you want the domain to point. Nothing about owning the domain changes, and there's no lock-in on our side.
No — you register and renew the domain with whoever you bought it from. The 99¢ here covers pointing it at your site and issuing SSL for it, not the domain name itself.
Four routes in, including one where your AI assistant does it. See how deploying works, or start with the base plan.