Overview
This article provides the instructions for pointing a custom domain to your School Loop site.
Although each School Loop site comes with a unique address, we highly recommend that you point your existing domain name(s) to your School Loop site(s). Instead of surfing to an address such as http://abc-xyz-ca.schoolloop.com, you could be using an address such as http://www.district.com. District employees, students, parents, and your community already know your web address, so why make them learn another?
- To use your custom domain with your School Loop site, you need to work with the company where you registered your domain (e.g., GoDaddy or Network Solutions).
- In some cases, your previous web hosting company may have hosted your domain or even provided your domain name. In such cases, please check with that hosting provider to ensure you have ownership of that domain and can configure DNS records following the directions below.
Pointing Your Domain to School Loop
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Please send us a list of your domains (up to 3 per site) so that we may configure our system to direct incoming traffic to the appropriate site.
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Create a CNAME record for each subdomain and point all of them to
cms.sl-host.com
.
- Example of domain not supported: www.district.com/school
- Example of supported domain: If the district domain is www.district.k12.ca.us, a supported subdomain for a school might be school.district.k12.ca.us.
Setting Up A Records
If you choose to point your root or naked domain to your School Loop site, you have to set up at least one A record pointed to an IP address for our system. Use the following IP address(es):
104.18.133.189
104.18.134.189
104.18.135.189
104.18.136.189
104.18.137.189
Creating a CNAME Record
For help with creating a CNAME Record, please contact your domain name registrar (e.g., Register.com or Network Solutions) for support. Keep in mind that changes to DNS records can take up to 48 hours to take effect.
Recommendations
- Where a district has both a state domain name (e.g., xyz.k12.ca.us) and a privately purchased domain name (e.g., www.district.net), create CNAME records for both domains.
- Create subdomains for each school in the district using all of your domains. For each subdomain, create a CNAME record as specified above.
- Where individual schools have purchased custom domain names, create CNAME records for those in addition to the subdomains owned by the district.
- Do not use a frame redirect (URL masking) to point your domain to School Loop. This method can cause unforeseen navigation problems on your site. See this article for more information.