By Frederik
Hi everyone — I’m building a SaaS on the DigitalOcean App Platform where each customer has a sub‑domain like user.myplatform.com. I also want to allow customers to bring their own custom domains (e.g. theirbrand.com) and map them to their sub‑domain on our platform (user.myplatform.com).
My questions:
If I have thousands of custom domains mapped to a single app instance on App Platform, how scalable is this setup? Are there known limits or performance/handoff issues when you have large numbers of custom domains on one app?
For example: Does App Platform impose a limit on “number of custom domains” per app (beyond the documented container/instance limits) when increasing the app spec?
Are there operational challenges (certificate issuance delays, DNS propagation, SSL renewal, routing, caching) when adding large numbers of domains programmatically?
If many domains point to the same app, does that create any bottlenecks or constraints (e.g., on the CDN, edge routing, certificate management)?
Is there a better alternative or pattern for a SaaS like this (many domains per customer) on DigitalOcean? For example:
Is there a separate “domain mapping” layer (e.g., using a load balancer, wildcard domain, reverse proxy) that works more smoothly for thousands of domains?
Any recommended best practices by DO for custom domain mapping at SaaS scale?
Regarding DNS/CNAME from the customer side:
theirbrand.com or www.theirbrand.com) to user.myplatform.com (or the .ondigitalocean.app domain) and then we (on our end) add the custom domain via App Platform’s domain settings?This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
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