Custom Domain – Using a Custom Domain Name for a Production Org (Not for Sites or Experience Cloud)

custom-domain

The Salesforce documentation (linked below) indicates that you can use an FQDN, like mydomainname.com, to point to your Salesforce production org. After having a little trouble setting this up, I contacted Salesforce Support and was told that this is only possible for Experience Cloud Sites. I always thought that was true as well, but the documentation only mentions Experience Cloud in saying that the CDN can only be used for Sites.

Has anyone set up a custom domain name for accessing a Salesforce production org, and, if so, can you explain how you've done it?

Referenced documentation:

Adding a Domain

Options for Serving a Custom Domain

Thanks!

Best Answer

Custom domain for base orgs (and its sandboxes) is not possible in Salesforce platform (at the least there is no documentation around this or OOB approach). You can only configure subdomains via My Domain (ref)

Consider the following (just my thoughts on why this isn't facilitated yet):

  1. As opposed to the base orgs, experience sites are lightweight, support heavy UX customization and actually meant for exposing web content to external users. Since, this perfectly falls under the use case of Salesforce customers wanting to serve their content via experience sites from their existing domains (or new custom domain), Salesforce has an implementation approach and necessary infrastructure in place to support the same.
  2. As mentioned here, there are many domains involved in base org (as opposed to experience cloud site)

In each Salesforce org, multiple domains serve content to users. In addition to your My Domain login URL, your org has application URLs on different domains. Here are a few examples.

Lightning pages, Visualforce pages, Experience Cloud sites, Experience Builder for Digital Experiences, Salesforce Sites User-stored content served by Salesforce, such as images and files

When you rename your My Domain or change your My Domain suffix, all those domains are updated.

  1. Salesforce is hosted in a multi-tenant infrastructure whose base domain, FQDN, CNAME and related DNS mappings have to follow a certain standard practice and security measures in place.

so, if the base org has to be exposed via custom domain, it would take a lot more than a simple CNAME change or DNS mapping. While this is technically possible, it would be a highly complex soluion and I don't think Salesforce (has planned or) has the strategy, infrastructure and necessary solutions in place yet.

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