For vanity domains that need customer-managed SSL certificates installed, Incident IQ recommends the use of Microsoft Azure as one potential solution for hosting and redirecting user traffic. CloudFlare and other providers are of course equally available, however below are the instructions for how to setup your vanity domain on Microsoft Azure with SSL certificate installed that will then automatically redirect to incidentiq.com:
- Login to https://portal.azure.com (if you don’t already have an account we recommend creating one for your district using your district’s email address.)
- From the Azure services dashboard click Create a resource, search for and select CDN from the results. Please note there are costs associated with simple CDN website hosting – check with Microsoft regarding pricing and availability. Overall, since this website is designed simply to relay traffic, costs are expected to be minimal however some cost may be incurred depending on your pricing plan.
There are free tiers available, however those tier options may not be sufficient to handle all present and future traffic depending on usage. - For the new CDN resource fill in the Name, Subscription, Resource Group and Pricing tier, along with checking Create a new CDN endpoint now (for Pricing tier we recommend Standard Microsoft.) Then fill in the CDN endpoint name and Origin type of value Custom origin.
- In the Origin hostname field, enter redirect.incidentiq.com.
- Click Create and wait until you receive a notification that your CDN profile has been created (see the upper right in the Azure portal for notifications.)
- Once created, click / navigate to your newly created CDN profile and ensure the “Overview” details
page is displayed where “Overview” should be highlighted in the CDN profile details screen. - Under the section titled Endpoints within Overview, click on the Custom origin endpoint you created from the endpoints list.
- Click the + Custom domain button at the top on the endpoint details screen.
- For Custom hostname, enter your vanity domain hostname. For example “myhelpdesk.my-districtvanity-domain.org”. Please note that a CNAME record must already be setup that points to the Azure CDN endpoint configured above. If this CNAME record is not yet present, Microsoft will display the following warning: “Before you can associate a domain with this CDN endpoint, you need to create a CNAME record with your DNS provider for ‘myhelpdesk.my-district-vanity domain.org’ that points to ‘test1-myhelpdesk.azureedge.net’.” where “test1-myhelpdesk” is the name you entered for the CDN endpoint name.
- Once the custom domain is added, click on the custom domain record and select On under Custom domain HTTPS. For Certificate management type we recommend “CDN managed”. For CDN managed, Microsoft will then walk you through the process of validating your domain setting up your certificate. Use of your own certificate is also an option. For more information regarding certificate management please see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/cdn-custom-ssl?tabs=option-1-default-enable-https-with-a-cdn-managed-certificate. Please note there are costs associated with hosted certificate management – check with Microsoft regarding pricing and availability.
- Close the Custom Domain screen and you should now be back at the endpoint Overview screen. Once there, click / navigate to Origin in the endpoint’s left navigation bar. For the field Origin host header only, enter your vanity domain hostname. For example “myhelpdesk.my-district-vanity-domain.org”. Click Save on this Origin screen once entered.
- Once all saves have been committed / posted by Microsoft to their edge-networks, you should then be able to navigate to your vanity domain hostname using HTTPS / SSL ( for example “https://myhelpdesk.my-district-vanity-domain.org” ) and your newly configured Microsoft Azure website should facilitate a HTTP server request to the backend “redirect.incidentiq.com” website which should, in turn, redirect you to your Incident IQ domain.