Hey Guys,
Can anyone confirm that you can have as many custom domains as you like with Netlify? We’re looking to move an app from S3 as they’ve just changed the rules regarding how many custom domains can point to one bucket so we can’t use them anymore.
Chris
Great question @chrisdjbell , and the answer is that we can only support up to about 50 names on a single site.
But of course you can deploy multiple copies with a different list of names on each, so effectively we can host any number of hostnames for the same codebase.
This will work best if you provide an SSL certificate, or if we manage your DNS for a domain and all hostnames for a site match the pattern something.yourdomain.com since we can issue one wildcard SSL certificate to cover all the names.
But up to about 50 random names will work ok too even if we handle the SSL provisioning. SSL provisioning will take QUITE awhile for sites set up with >20 names, and unless we help you with it, you’d be limited to <= 20 hostnames PER WEEK added to any single site (our SSL provider has strict rate limits and adding names one by one will hit them around 20 total names).
Best practice here would probably be to provide your own SSL certificate to start with, to ensure a smooth transition, and then we could help you migrate to a managed one once DNS is all correctly pointing to us.
Do you have anywhere you would recommend to get the cert from?
All the vendors that will sell you a certificate are pretty much equivalent, unless you need something special. I usually find the cheapest price for a wildcard certificate by googling “cheap wildcard certificate” - it always points to the same few vendors like alphassl and comodo, but there is usually someone with a “sale” on that I can only find by googling. Doing so right now I see a $42 price point that is pretty appealing 
Is it required to use Netlify DNS to have wildcard certificate? Meaning can I have wildcard certificate without using Netlify DNS?
Thanks!
No requirements at all around us DNS hosting to use any feature (though some like wildcard SSL and branch subdomains are automatic if you do use our hosting). Any DNS host will work for this purpose.
Sorry for not being clear earlier.
My question is - Can Netlify issue wildcard certificate when the DNS is hosted externally? Or is it required to use Netlify DNS for Netlify to issue wildcard certificate?
To me it seems it’s the latter. I set up foo.com with Netlify DNS and bar.com with external DNS. Then I noticed that Netlify issued wildard certificate only for foo.com (the one using Netlify DNS) and not for bar.com. For bar.com the certificate contained www.bar.com and bar.com only. It didn’t have *.bar.com unlike for foo.com which had *.foo.com.
Can you please confirm that or am I doing something wrong?
Thanks!
Ah, no, our wildcard certificates can only be configured for domains that we host DNS for, so your experiment showed the results I expect.
You can of course upload your own lets encrypt wildcard if you don’t mind rotating every 90 days, (or one from a different vendor if you want a longer runway).
Before you go too deep into making this work, the feature is pro-teams-only, so is a $45/mo subscription here in addition to potentially purchasing a certificate.