Site Designer Guide
s-drive hosting publishing coffeecup custom-domain dns

Publish to CoffeeCup S-Drive

S-Drive is CoffeeCup’s own managed hosting platform, built to connect directly to Site Designer: design, click publish, and your site is live.

What’s included

  • Free SSL on every site
  • CDN delivery
  • 99.9% uptime SLA
  • Starting at 5 GB of storage

Published sites get a subdomain in the form https://your-site.coffeecup.com.

Publishing

The app uploads all your files to your CoffeeCup account automatically — no separate upload step. All you need is your CoffeeCup email address and password.

  1. Click the Settings toolbar button and choose Publish.
  2. Enter your CoffeeCup email and password, then click Sign me in!
  3. From the list of your available addresses, click the one you want to publish to, then click OK.
  4. Click Publish in the toolbar. When the upload finishes, a link to your site appears on screen.

The Publish tab in Settings, asking for your CoffeeCup email and password

From then on, publishing is one click.

Using your own domain

Your S-Drive site doesn’t have to live on its CoffeeCup address. You can point a domain name you own at it, whether you buy the domain through S-Drive or already have one with another registrar.

Buy a domain through S-Drive

  1. While signed in to S-Drive, open the domain purchase page, enter the domain name you want, click Add Domain, and follow the steps to buy it.
  2. Wait for the confirmation email. Once it arrives, visitors to that domain see everything you publish through your S-Drive account.
  3. Open the Master Your Domains page. It lists your purchased domains, each with a drop-down of your CoffeeCup URLs. Choose the URL the domain should point to.
  4. Tick Use www if the site should also answer on www.yourdomain.com.
  5. Click Save Settings.

Use a domain from another registrar

A domain bought elsewhere can point to S-Drive too. It takes two parts: a DNS change at your registrar, then an alias in S-Drive.

At your registrar

  1. Log in to your registrar account and open the DNS management page. Some registrars call it Edit DNS or Host Records. You may need to select the domain first.
  2. Find the input for the @ symbol. This sets the domain’s A record.
  3. Enter 66.223.62.9 as the A record value, and save.

In S-Drive

  1. Go to your S-Drive Dashboard, click the Settings tab, then click Manage Domains.
  2. On the Domain page, select Your Domain Aliases.
  3. Enter your domain name in the first field, choose the CoffeeCup address it should point to from the drop-down, and click Add Alias.
  4. Click Hosting → Settings in the top navigation menu, and use the drop-down to set your alias as the Primary Domain.

Subdomains such as www

The A record only covers the bare domain: mydomain.com works, but www.mydomain.com doesn’t, because www is a subdomain. Add each subdomain as a CNAME record, on the same registrar page as the A record:

  • Host name — the subdomain, such as www or blog.
  • CNAME value — your domain, such as mydomain.com.

Repeat this for as many subdomains as you like.

Check the domain

To test a CNAME setup, go to your S-Drive Dashboard, click the Settings tab, enter your domain name in the box next to http://, and click Check Domain.

  • “Success! Looks like your domain is set up correctly.” Click Save Settings at the bottom of the page, and your domain now opens your S-Drive site.
  • “Oh no! Looks like your domain is not set up correctly.” Ask your registrar to confirm the record was entered properly, and remember that changes can take 24–72 hours.

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