Host Your Abenity Program from Your Own Domain

Feature Availability: Hosting Abenity Programs from your own domain name is only supported at Abenity's Enterprise, Enterprise Plus, Customer Loyalty Pro and Customer Loyalty Premium service levels.

Abenity has configured its unique suite of web applications so that clients may provide them to their end-users through their own domain, complementing the private branded experience.

Introduction 

Abenity offers several different levels of private branding within our web applications so that you can customize the way our services are presented to your members. One of the many branding options we provide is the ability to choose which domain you would like to host your Abenity program from, and as a result customize the URL at which your members access your program. You can choose to go with a simple co-branded approach using Abenity.com, upgrade to one of our preselected vanity domains, or implement a fully private-labeled experience by hosting your program through your own domain. Below is brief overview of the these three program options. 

Our standard option is a co-branded approach where your members access their Abenity services through Abenity.com. In a co-branded scenario your members would log in to their program by visiting https://clientname.abenity.com/login, where “clientname” is the program username your organization chose during registration. 

A second option is to use one of our pre-selected vanity domains. Abenity offers a number of vanity domains - a few of our current selections include employeediscounts.co, memberdiscounts.co, and hrperks.com. When you utilize a vanity domain, your members will access your Abenity services at https://clientname.memberdiscounts.co/login. In this scenario, “abenity. com” is no longer in the domain name, placing more focus on your brand name. For more information on our vanity domain options please visit http://abty.co/VanityDomains. 

Our third, and most private branded URL option, is to offer your Abenity program through your own domain name. This is an especially valuable option if creating a seamless user experience is of utmost importance as you’ll never have to redirect your members away from your own website. For example, if your company name is ACME Incorporated, and you own the web domain acmeincorporated.com, you may choose to have members access your Abenity program directly at acmeincorporated.com. To implement this you will use your existing website’s Domain Name Server (DNS) to point your entire website, or a subdomain of your website, to Abenity’s servers. As a result, your members will be able to access your Abenity services by visiting a top-level domain like https://acmeincorporated.com/login or a subdomain like https://perks.acmeincorporated.com. In both of these examples your organization has the option to fully define the domain or subdomain that you use.

This Help Center article will cover instructions on how to set up your existing domain to point to Abenity’s application server. In general, there are two steps that you will need to complete in order to provide your Abenity services from your domain: 

1. Select the domain or subdomain that you will use to host your services 
2. Point our domain to Abenity’s server using your DNS record

Step 1: Acquire Your Domain or Subdomain 

In order to host your Abenity services from a domain or subdomain of your organization’s choice, your organization will need to select and purchase a domain name and/or set up a subdomain. Domain names can be purchased from several different sites, such as GoDaddy.com, Hostway.com, NetworkSolutions.com or 1and1.com. Any of these sites will provide the tools necessary to select and purchase an available domain name. Most importantly, you will want to make sure that your service provides the ability to manage your DNS Record, which is necessary in order to point your domain name to Abenity so that we can deliver content to your domain. 

Domain vs. Subdomain 

You may choose to present your Abenity services on your primary domain (e.g. acmeincorporated.com), a subdomain of your primary domain (e.g. perks.acmeincorporated.com), or through a newly created domain. Regardless of your choice Abenity services will be accessible to your members by navigating their web browser directly to a login page on your domain or subdomain. 

There is no right or wrong choice whether you choose to use a domain or subdomain. But an advantage of using a subdomain is that you can continue to present your own primary website content at www.acmeincorporated.com (such as your standard corporate site) while isolating your Abenity services at an address like perks.acmeincorporated.com.

Domain Ownership Verification

In order for Abenity to add the new domain to our SSL License, our SSL License provider may require proof of ownership for the domain. This typically requires the owner of the domain to create a temporary DNS TXT record containing a specific value that can be used as a proof of ownership. 

Step 2: Point Your Domain to Abenity’s Server Using Your DNS Record 

The final step is to update your domain’s DNS Record so that your domain or subdomain points to Abenity’s server IP address. This completes the connection, so that when your members enter your website’s address they are ultimately connected to Abenity’s servers. To do this you will need to log in to the service that manages your domain’s DNS Record. You will need to add a DNS “A” Record, which allows you to point a portion of your domain to a specific IP Address. 

Here is a sample of what a DNS entry would look like to have your Abenity services loaded from perks.acmeincorporated.com: 

perks.acmeincorporated.com.      86400      IN      A      184.106.44.190 

In this DNS entry “perks.acmeincorporated.com.” indicates the (sub)domain that this entry controls, “86400” is the number of seconds the entry should last until the DNS servers check for an update, “IN A” indicates that this is a an entry for an IP addresses, and finally “184.106.44.190” is the IP address for your Abenity service. This IP address will vary and Abenity’s technical support team will need to provide the correct IP address for your program. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

How long will this take? 

Domain name registrations are typically completed within 24-48 hours, but this is ultimately determined by the domain registrar. SSL Certificate installations can typically be completed within 2 business days by Abenity. In addition to the installation process, DNS records may take 24-48 hours to propagate to Internet routers worldwide. Since there are numerous parties involved it is best to plan for a full week to complete configuration.