Your web address

Your public pages live at an address. There are two, and you can have both.

Your Isle Stay address

Every account picks a name that becomes yourname.islestay.app. Set it under Settings.

The rules: three to forty characters, lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens only, no hyphen at the start or end, no double hyphens, and at least one letter. A short list of names is reserved - anything that could be mistaken for Isle Stay itself, or for a login page.

Choose this carefully. It is the address that ends up on printed cards, in QR codes, in WhatsApp messages and in guests' bookmarks. Changing it later breaks every one of them, so treat it as close to permanent.

Pick the business name rather than a property name. saffron-palms still works when you add a fourth villa; villa-4 does not.

Connecting a domain you already own

On the Pro plan and above you can point your own domain at Isle Stay, so guests see your name instead of ours.

Under Settings → Connections, add the domain. You will then be shown a DNS record to add - the exact type and value depend on whether you are connecting the bare domain or a subdomain like book.yourdomain.com, so use the values on screen rather than any you have seen elsewhere.

Add that record wherever your DNS is managed. That is usually whoever you bought the domain from, though not always - if the domain has ever been moved to Cloudflare or a web host, the records live there instead.

Then press Check again.

Occasionally you will be asked for a second record first, to prove the domain is yours. That only happens when the domain is already attached to another account somewhere, and it blocks everything else until it is done.

The certificate is automatic. Once the record is visible, the secure padlock is issued without you doing anything. There is nothing to buy and nothing to install.

How long it takes

Anything from a minute to a few hours. DNS changes spread at their own pace and neither we nor your registrar can hurry it.

If it has been more than a day, the record is almost certainly in the wrong place - most often added at the registrar while the domain's DNS is actually being served by somebody else.

What does not change

Sign-in stays on Isle Stay. You and your team keep logging in at islestay.app regardless of what your guests see. Your own domain serves the public pages, not the hub.

Your Isle Stay address keeps working. Connecting a domain does not switch the other one off, so links already in the wild stay alive.

Common questions

Can I change my Isle Stay address later? It is deliberately hard, because the cost lands on your guests rather than on you. If you genuinely need to, open Help & Support rather than working around it.

Do I need my own domain? No. A lot of hosts run entirely on their Isle Stay address. It matters most if you are advertising offline, where the address is read and remembered rather than clicked.

Can I use a subdomain of a domain I use for something else? Yes - stay.yourbusiness.com pointed here while the main site stays where it is. That is often the easiest option if you already have a website.

What happens to my domain if I stop paying? The domain stays yours; it is registered to you, not to us. The connection to Isle Stay is what lapses.