Custom URLs

When you arrange to have your site hosted on IRT servers, we will choose an appropriate place for it in the greater med.stanford.edu hierarchy. Once built and installed, your site will be available to the world at this "hierarchical" URL such as http://med.stanford.edu/school/bobsclinic/

For the marketing needs of most sites hosted by IRT, this is the most appropriate form of URL. It uniquely identifies the site within the greater context of the Medical Center web while lending positive brand and image support from its root components.

However, depending on your audience and marketing needs, you may want to give your site a custom URL such as http://bobsclinic.stanford.edu/. After you have made arrangements with IRT, users will be able to "arrive" at your site through this "short-form" or "custom" URL.

Custom URLs always take the form "abcxyz.stanford.edu," where abcxyz is the part you can customize. No "www"s, hyphens or additional dots. To see if a domain is available, try typing it into your browser, if you get a "Server not found" error, the domain is probably available.

Note: Personal URLs of the form "myname.stanford.edu," i.e. "smith.stanford.edu" or "johnsmith.stanford.edu" are not supported, although you can get "smithlab.stanford.edu," "smithgroup.stanford.edu" or something similar.

You must have a site hosted on IRT's server in order to obtain a custom domain. To request hosting for your site, and to request a custom domain for it, please contact Web Help.

Using your custom domain

The following issues arise with custom domains:

If you use WebAuth to secure areas of your site, you must use "https://" and the full med domain path of your site, i.e. https://med.stanford.edu/path/to/yoursite/, for your links, or the site won't be accessible.
If you use an Email Form, your custom domain and any recipient email addresses must be added to the FormMail script by IRT.
If your site is in the SiteBuilder format, then FrameMaster, the utility for serving inside pages in the appropriate frameset, will only work with the long, med domain URL.