Host mapping - Changing the URL of your help center



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Charles Nadeau

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Mar 06, 2025


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Hello Ahmed,
 
When using a Zendesk-provisioned SSL certificate, the certificate's common name is the default brand/ subdomain. You don’t get the option to set up the CN if using our Let’s Encrypt certs. 
 
However, you can upload your certificate and provide a private key to Zendesk to choose your own CN.

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Hola muy buenas Merigen, 
 
Para poder asistirte diligentemente, he creado un ticket en tu nombre. Ya mismo estoy revisándo esto y te contacto por allí.
 
Saludos y muy buen viernes.

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Hello Ahmed,
 
When you said certificate common name, are you referring to the default brand URL?
 
The host-mapping and the SSL certificate do not determine the default brand URL. The default brand configured in Admin Center > Accounts > Brand management > Brands is the brand associated with your default Help Center. 
 
Kindly check the article Editing brands for more information.

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Hello Heather, 

 

You may want to check this documentation about Allowing Zendesk to send email on behalf of your email domain

It provides a step-by-step process on how you can authorize Zendesk to send out notifications as if they originated from your own email address so you can preserve your company branding.

 

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Is there a way to make the email responses look like they're coming from the redirected subdomain? If I have niftyname.com redirecting to mysite.zendesk.com, can I set it up so the email responses seem to be coming from help@niftyname.com

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Hello Jennifer, 
 
Thanks for the sharing more information. Yes, we could only create one alias for zendesk subdomain as described in the article. If you have multiple brands then you can additional CNAME record for each brand/sudomain. Do you mean per brand not branch? Natively, when you create a new help center associated to that brand, the help center will be the default copenhagen theme and the contents are not related to your existing brand. You need to create and build its content for that help center. It has no access to other content of the other brand by default unless once you move forward you can customize the content with hyperlinks and content blocks that connects to other brand. Thank you!

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Hi Jupete,

Thank you for responding.  For my first question, I want to have 1 brand with multiple help centers (different sub-domains) where each sub-domain has different categories/sections/articles.  What is the best way to do this?

For my second question, I want to have multiple brands (so different zendesk sub-domains) that all point to the same content.  For example, 1 instance of an article that 5 different brands can show within their sub-domain.  How do I do this?

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Hi Jennifer, thank you for writing in! We would like to confirm if each alias is for associated for each help center of your brands? But natively, the host-mapping is mapping or an alias to you your help center subdomain not directing to your other pages. However, if you could share more details please let us know. 
 
For your second question, if you are referring to the help center content (articles/sections/categories), then it may vary depending on what you will import or add into your articles per help center brand. 
 
 
Thank you!
 
 

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If we wanted to setup two aliases support.company.com and legal.company.com, is there a way to direct each alias to a different subset of pages?  

Also, if we have multiple brands I see how we can set the alias mapping so you can have support.company1.com and support.company2.com, but I wanted to confirm they could both display the same content under different sub-domains.  

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Hi Raul, 
 
I'm afraid you cannot use two different subdomains for the same brand. Zendesk allows each brand within a Zendesk Support account to have only one subdomain (host mapping), which acts as the primary URL for the brand's help center. However, you can manage content in multiple languages under one subdomain using Zendesk's localization features.
 
Take a look at this article for your reference: Configuring your help center to support multiple languages
 
I hope this helps. 
 

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