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Subdomain setup

Signals collects website events through a subdomain of your own site rather than through a Datahash address. Setting that up means adding one or more DNS records wherever your domain is managed.

The subdomain is set up once per project. A project holds one subdomain, so a second site means a second project.

Why it is worth doing

Section titled “Why it is worth doing”

A cookie set by code loaded from your own domain, or a subdomain of it, is a first-party cookie. A cookie set by code loaded from somewhere else is a third-party cookie, and browsers have been restricting those for years.

The same logic applies to the request itself. Ad blockers treat a request to a subdomain of the site you are on as internal, and do not block it. So collecting through your own subdomain is what keeps the events flowing and the identifiers intact, which is why a web integration with an unfinished subdomain shows up as poor match quality rather than as an outage.

Before you start

Section titled “Before you start”
  • Access to the DNS settings for your domain. That is usually at the company you bought it from, and sometimes at a separate DNS provider or a hosting panel.
  • The subdomain name and the record values from Datahash. These are generated for your account, so use the ones in your setup window or onboarding email rather than any example.

The subdomain has to sit under the main domain’s registry and must not be hosted as a primary domain.

NS or CNAME

Section titled “NS or CNAME”

Either can be used and Datahash will tell you which one applies to your setup. They are not interchangeable, so check before you start.

Record typeWhat it does
NSHands DNS management for that one subdomain to Datahash’s nameservers. Queries for the subdomain are answered there while your main domain carries on unchanged. You will be given four values and each needs its own record.
CNAMEPoints the subdomain at an address Datahash gives you. One record, one value.

Wherever a provider offers both, each one saves cleanly and only the one you were asked for works. Adding the wrong type is the failure that looks most like success. A few panels offer only one type, Salla among them, and those pages say so.

Adding NS records

Section titled “Adding NS records”

  1. Sign in to your domain provider and open the DNS management section for the domain.

  2. Add a new record.

  3. Choose NS as the type.

  4. Enter the record name and one of the nameserver values from your Datahash setup window.

  5. Save, then repeat until all four nameserver values exist as separate records.

The four values are there for redundancy, so DNS for the subdomain keeps resolving if one nameserver is unreachable. A partial delegation looks correct in the DNS panel and still fails.

Adding a CNAME record

Section titled “Adding a CNAME record”

  1. Sign in to your domain provider and open the DNS management section for the domain.

  2. Add a new record and choose CNAME as the type.

  3. Put the subdomain in the name field and the value Datahash gave you in the value field.

  4. Adjust the TTL if you want to, then save.

Your provider

Section titled “Your provider”

Any DNS provider works. Datahash places no restriction on where your domain is managed, because all that is required is a record you can add yourself.

The steps are near identical everywhere and only the menu names change, so the general steps above will get you there at any provider. These pages give the exact menu path, the record type each provider publishes guidance for, and anything about that panel worth knowing before you start.

Common mistakes

Section titled “Common mistakes”
  • Typing the full subdomain into a host field that already appends the domain, which produces a doubled name such as s2s.yourdomain.com.yourdomain.com. Most providers want only the label.
  • Adding a CNAME where NS was asked for, or the other way round. Both save cleanly and only one of them works.
  • Adding only one of the four nameserver values.
  • Adding the records to a different domain, which is easy on an account holding several.
  • Dropping the trailing dot from a nameserver value at a provider that requires it.

Confirming it worked

Section titled “Confirming it worked”

Tell Datahash once the records are saved. Delegation is verified from our side, and you will hear back either that the subdomain is resolving or which record is missing or misspelled.

DNS changes are cached, so the previous answer can still be served for as long as the old record’s time to live. If a later setup step fails within minutes of saving the records, wait rather than starting again. If it is still not resolving, see Your subdomain is not resolving.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”