Adding a custom domain for short links

By default, you can use one of your domains when creating short links. E.g. itl.link/your-path or sholink.to/your-path

On any of the paid plans, you can add your own domain for creating short links, like go.yoursite.com/your-path.

We highly recommend adding your own domains for short links and here is why.

Our default short link domains (e.g. itl.ink, or sholink.to) can be used by anyone who signs up to Hovercode, including free users. We want to make it easy for people to sign up and use Hovercode, including the short link feature. Most people are decent and use the short links in legitimate ways, but occasionally, people sign up and try use these short links in shady and spammy ways (e.g. phishing). While we are always working to detect and remove these bad actors as soon as possible, sometimes they are tricky to catch and before we know it, the links get flagged by anti virus softwares.

Even after we remove the shady links from Hovercode, the default domains like itl.ink remain flagged in the anti virus software databases and it can take a while for them to reevaluate the domain and mark it as safe. So even when you shorten legitimate links with the default domains, they can get flagged by these anti virus softwares in the meantime.

That's why it's highly recommended that you connect your own domain to Hovercode and use that to shorten your links. Only you can use your domain to shorten links, so it's guaranteed that they won't be used for shady reasons and won't be flagged, so anyone will be able to open your shortened links without any warnings.

Of course, there are other benefits like branding, being able to migrate your short links to other platforms etc. This is why we highly recommend using your own domains for short links. Consider the free version of link shortening on Hovercode a way to evaluate if you like the software and want to upgrade to continue to shorten your links with it.

If you want to learn more about how to connect a domain, you can see that here: https://help.hovercode.com/hovercode/article/8-qr-code-custom-domain/