Domain Is Already Owned by Another Vercel Account – Solution

Problem#

Finally, you have set up your project and hosted it on Vercel, but when you want to add a custom domain this error happens:

Error: The domain is already owned by another Vercel account.

I will talk about my case, then explain other cases.

I own the essaidi.me domain, and in the past I added a lot of subdomains for multiple web apps, and everything was working fine. But when I wanted to add essaidi.me, I was surprised that the domain is already in another account.

I reached the customer support of Vercel, and they informed me that my domain (actually subdomain) is associated with Hashnode, which is a blogging platform for developers, because I had already made a subdomain called blog.essaidi.me.

But wait! Hashnode is another thing, right? Well, actually according to the support, Hashnode runs their system on top of Vercel, and the domain is associated with the Hashnode Vercel account.

For other people who are not related to Hashnode and want to add just a subdomain, and they have already added a domain on their Vercel account, Vercel said that they will be rolling out an update to officially support this use case.

Solution#

Quick Solution#

If you already have a subdomain or domain on Hashnode, contact them and ask them to remove your domain so you can use it on Vercel. But that means that your subdomain on Hashnode will be lost.

Best Solution#

If you don't want to remove your subdomain from Hashnode, or you already have a domain in Vercel, the only solution is to wait for the upcoming updates by Vercel.

According to their support, the update will allow domains to be shared between different Vercel accounts in the near future.