You can now delegate a subdomain to Netlify DNS without having to bring over the apex domain! For example, you can let Netlify manage a subdomain like app.example.com while leaving example.com on your primary DNS service.

You can now get the benefits of Netlify DNS management on your subdomains—even if you can’t move your apex domain to Netlify.

Learn more in the docs.

Benefits of bringing your project’s subdomain to Netlify DNS

When you use Netlify for DNS management on a subdomain (app.example.com), you gain a number of productivity, security, and performance benefits.

You can:

• Easily serve different content from different branches. Branch subdomains allow you to spin up unlimited environments, such as staging.app.example.com, beta.app.example.com, etc.
• Take advantage of Netlify’s automatically-provisioned SSL certificates. Your wildcard certificate will help secure app.example.com and all of its subdomains.
• Ensure your site uses Netlify’s CDN for this subdomain and all of its subdomains. Gain a performance boost and serve content from locations closest to your site visitors.

How to set up subdomain delegation

First, you’ll need to make sure your domain registrar supports NS records (or name server records) on subdomains. Once you’ve been able to verify this:

1. Go to Team Overview > Domains in the Netlify UI.
2. Choose “Add or register a domain.”
3. Enter your subdomain, e.g. app.example.com, and complete the steps!

The final step in this process will give you NS records to enter at your registrar. As with any DNS changes, it can take 24 hours or more to propagate in the domain name system.

Let us know what you think

We’ve added support for subdomain delegation based on customer requests, so we’d love to know what you think! You can share your thoughts on this 3-question survey or in the community forums. Thanks for any feedback!