What Is Name Stow?

Name Stow is a service that facilitates the seamless integration of web domains with your applications. Our platform specialises in enabling the implementation of custom domains, a feature highly valued by end-users seeking to maintain their unique brand identity online.

Our globally distributed infrastructure efficiently manages the bidirectional flow of internet traffic between user-specified domains and your applications. Furthermore, our system takes on the crucial responsibility of provisioning and maintaining SSL certificates for each domain under its management, ensuring robust security and data integrity.

What Is a Custom Domain?

A Custom Domain is an entity you setup in Name Stow. It contains two parts, a source domain and a target domain. The targer is usually the domain to your application and the source is the user-specified domain they want to use to access your application.

How to Setup DNS

The user-specified domain must be pointing to Name Stow's proxies using a CNAME DNS record at in.namestow.com. This is what you tell your customers to setup.

You can optinally customise the proxy domain so it remains on brand by creating a CNAME record to in.namestow.com from your domain and instead tell your customers to point their domain to that.

Integrating with Your Application

When a request reaches your application via a custom domain, you can tailor the response to that particular domain. For example, in a multi-tenant e-commerce platform, each custom domain would display its unique storefront, product catalog, and branding, ensuring a distinct and personalized experience for every merchant's customers.

Identifying Custom Domains

The request will include the X-Served-For header which your application can use to determine which custom domain the request is for. This header contains the user-specified domain that the request was made to and you can return the appropriate content based on this value.

Client side applications can use the `window.location.hostname` do determine the domain and make the necessary requests to get the content for this custom domain.

API

Ideally you wouldn't manually create Custom Domain entities in Name Stow and instead this process would be automatted using the API. With the API you can fully manage the Custom Domains within your account. You can receive custom domains from your users within your application and as part of handling that request, call the Name Stow API to create Custom Domain records.

Tokens

To use the API, you need to authenticate with an API token. Tokens can be generated from within the Name Stow application with an expiry time or infinite length.