Using your own domain
Buying a domain, pointing it at your booking page, and what the wait in the middle is for.
Your booking page works from the day you're approved, at your salon's address on inchair.app. Connecting a domain of your own is optional — it's about how the link looks on a card, a window, or the side of a van.
If you don't have one yet
You buy a domain from a registrar, and you rent it yearly. Any of these work — we're not affiliated with them and there's nothing to pick carefully here, the domain behaves the same wherever it came from:
- Cloudflare (opens in a new tab) — sells at cost, no upsells, but the dashboard assumes you know what DNS is
- Namecheap (opens in a new tab) — cheap, straightforward, popular with people doing this for the first time
- Porkbun (opens in a new tab) — same bracket, unusually clear interface
- GoDaddy (opens in a new tab) — the one most people have heard of; watch the renewal price against the first-year offer
- Hover (opens in a new tab) — plainer and slightly pricier, with add-ons off by default
A domain and a website are separate things. You only need the domain — the page it points at is the one you already have here. If a registrar tries to sell you hosting, a site builder, or an email plan alongside it, none of that is needed for this.
Pick something short enough to say out loud over the noise of a dryer. A .com is the safe default because it's what people type by reflex; a .salon or .hair reads well in print and gets misremembered as .com by half the people who see it.
Connecting it
- Open Settings → Your own domain (opens in a new tab) and enter the domain you own.
- We show you the DNS records to add. Leave that tab open.
- Sign in at your registrar and add those records exactly as shown, in whatever it calls DNS or Advanced DNS.
- Come back and confirm they're in. From here it's waiting.
A DNS record is one long string, and a single wrong character fails silently — the check just never goes green, with nothing to say why. Copy and paste each one.
The wait is normal
Two things happen after you've added the records, and neither needs anything from you:
It's safe to close the tab. Progress doesn't depend on the page being open, and a list that hasn't moved in an hour isn't stuck.
We don't call a domain live until we've confirmed both that the records resolve and that the certificate genuinely works over a real HTTPS connection. That second check exists because calling it live on DNS alone once sent clients to a browser security warning.
Once it's live
Your inchair.app address forwards to the new one, so anything already printed, linked or saved keeps working — you don't need to reprint cards the same week. The domain is also registered with Stripe at that point, which is what keeps Apple Pay and Google Pay working on the new address.
A domain is rented. If it lapses, your booking page stops answering on it — turn on auto-renew at your registrar and keep a card on file there that hasn't expired.