To easily try out or let us manage the infrastructure, we provide a hosted instance of TXTDirect with global anycasted IPs and a distributed set of servers to redirect your users as fast as possible.

Take a look at our hosted version or jump right into the Usage Guide.

• Basics
• Subdomains
• Subdomains Table

To use TXTDirect's hosted service you first have to add a CNAME or A record to your DNS zone file that points to the hosted service's domain which is txtd.io.

The reason that you need these records is that when txtd.io receives a request, it will look for a TXT record on the _redirect.example.com zone, which example.com stands for the incoming request's host. So when you point the CNAME or A records to txtd.io, TXTDirect will look for the TXT records on your zone file using the request's host. So you can host your zone file anywhere using any tool you like, and let txtd.io take care of your redirects.

Adding a new record can be different based on your DNS service provider but in general the added record should look like this:

a.example.com                    86000 IN CNAME   txtd.io.

Note: Keep in mind that CNAME records only work on subdomains, so if you want to redirect the incoming requests to your root record, you have to add A and AAAA records to your zone file.

The records for a root redirect should look like this:

example.com             86000 IN A       45.85.238.5
example.com             86000 IN AAAA    2a0e:c885:5::1

Now that the CNAME or A records are setup, you can start adding the TXT records. For example, to redirect the requests for twitter.example.com to twitter.com/example, you can add the following records to your zone file.

twitter.example.com             86000 IN CNAME   txtd.io.
_redirect.twitter.example.com   86000 IN TXT     "v=txtv0;type=host;to=https://twitter.com/example"

So the example above points twitter.example.com to TXTDirect's servers and when TXTDirect receives a request for twitter.example.com, it will look for a TXT record with the _redirect.twitter.example.com address. Then it will redirect the requests based on the TXT record's type and endpoint, which in case of this example, it redirects the requests without any additional check and logic to the endpoint specified in the to= field.

You can use all of TXTDirect's types and features on the hosted service too and the only thing that is different compared to running your instance is that you have to point each domain to txtd.io before writing its TXT records like the examples above.

Take a look at the Basic Configuration page to learn more about TXTDirect's types and how they work. The Specification page details the available types. Additional Record Examples give some ideas for each type and more complex examples like combining the types.