Occasionally, adding a custom domain to Laravel Cloud may appear stuck or time out entirely. Keep in mind that verification is never instant as we are dependent on the propagation of global DNS providers which can take up to 24 hours in some cases. Below are some common issues that may be impacting the ability for your domain to be added successfully.
  • You did not add an entry for redirect. Laravel recommends you enable the Redirect from www. setting and it is enabled by default. If you leave this enabled, Laravel Cloud will try to validate both example.com and www.example.com. If the www record is missing, the validation can fail.
  • If you’re using Squarespace as your DNS provider, If you’re using Squarespace as your DNS provider, they have unique naming conventions that may not match the instructions you see within Laravel Cloud. Specifically, in any name or host record, you need to remove the .example.com (including the preceding period) before any record.
    • For example, if the Laravel Cloud instructions says to create a pre-verification record for _cf-custom-hostname.example.com then within Squarespace’s DNS settings, you should enter _cf-custom-hostname as the host.
    • This is also true for the “A” records. For example, instead of entering www.example.com, you should simply enter www.
    • If you’re using the wildcard subdomain option, instead of *.example.com as the host, simply enter *.
  • My domain shows it has propagated successfully via external tools. If your domain has successfully propagated as validated from an external DNS Lookup service, but is still showing as “Validating” or “Timed Out” on Laravel Cloud, this often means there is a manual review on your domain from our network provider, Cloudflare. This can be true even if your domain is not hosted on Cloudflare. Cloudflare can sometimes block domains from being added due to potential abuse concerns. This flag is automated and we understand that it’s often a false positive that requires intervention on the Cloudflare side to resolve. Please raise a ticket through the Help portal from your Laravel Cloud dashboard for assistance resolving this issue.