Sue SmithYou can use your own domain for your Glitch site for free with Fastly and get a performance, security, and site analytics boost out of the box. Follow along with this ten minute video to set yours up!
Read on to find out about the other goodies you can get your hands on when you try this out...
Custom domains on Glitch
When you remix a Glitch app, it's instantly available on the web at a glitch.me address. You can change your project name and the URL for your app updates automatically. This is super handy for sharing your projects, but what's even better is having your own domain to point at your site.
đź“Ł There are lots of reasons you should have your own domain!
Being able to use your own domain for your Glitch websites has always been important to us – it's part of being a true open web platform. A while ago, the third-party integration we were using to let people set up custom domains for their Glitch projects was shut down, and we had to press pause on the custom domains feature in the editor.
The good news is that Glitch is now part of Fastly, a platform that conveniently gives you the ability to use your own domain with your Glitch site for free, with a few extra benefits thrown in.
In the video we walk you through the process:
- Setting up a Fastly service
- Getting a TLS certificate
- Updating your DNS records
DNS is one of the most notoriously confusing parts of the web, so part of our goal is to demystify it – it's an incredibly important part of owning your own web presence!
Gone viral? Nice!
One of the benefits to using a Fastly service with your custom domain is that if when your app goes viral, you're far less likely to encounter rate limiting errors. Fastly is designed for this very purpose – it caches your content on its global network of servers, which reduces the number of requests going to your origin (your Glitch site). This is why many of the biggest sites on the web use Fastly, and why it sets your projects up to be truly scalable when you hit the big time. 🤩
Under attack? No problem!
Your Fastly service includes security measures by default, like DDoS mitigation. There's nothing worse than your app getting popular then suddenly finding yourself under attack! The Fastly network automatically blocks DDoS attacks, filtering malicious requests at the edge (the Fastly network of PoPs – Points of Presence around the world) so that they never even get near your website.
Want to know how many hits you're getting? Done!
Of course you want to know how many people are visiting your beautiful websites. In the past you basically had to roll your own analytics for your Glitch projects (OK so we briefly had analytics for teams but it didn't quite work out). When you set up a Fastly service, it includes metrics through Observability dashboards that start populating as soon as you send your domain traffic through Fastly.
Find out how many requests you're getting, which regions visits are coming from, spot any errors or performance issues, and gain all sorts of visibility into what's happening with your site traffic.
All free 🤑
It bears repeating! All you need to bring with you to use what we've talked about in this post is a domain of your own. Everything you need from Fastly to point your domain at your Glitch site and access all these other benefits is completely free. It would be daft not to take advantage tbqh.
