Once you have a registered custom domain with a domain registrar, there are three steps required in order to point that custom domain at your Our School Pages website.

WARNING:  Before beginning this process, make sure you have everything you need from your old website.  Once you perform these steps, typing in your custom domain name into your browser will immediately take you to your new Our School Pages website.  This means you will no longer have any way to get back to your old website.

Step 1.  Setup DNS record for you custom domain.

Please follow steps in Migration-to-new-server 

Step 2.  Set the custom domain in your Basic Settings

First, you need to tell your Our School Pages website to expect requests coming in on that domain name.

• Visit your Our School Pages website (using your standard domain), and sign in as Admin.

• Go to your Basic Settings page.
• In the Custom domain field, enter the custom domain that you have registered.  Make sure you only enter the two part domain name, leaving off any extra segments to the left.  For example, enter simply "lakesidepta.org", not "http://www.lakesidepta.org". (If you have existing domain and want to use a subdomain like "pta.lakeside.org" that also works if no other sites are using "lakeside.org")
• Press Save.

WARNING. Below Steps are no longer recommended. We recommend you to control your own DNS server so later you can freely control it, you may need to update it to setup email, setup office 365/G Suite etc. Please follow steps in Migration-to-new-server instead. If you still want to follow the Old Step 2 and use OSP nameservers, after change the nameservers you can create a support ticket and we can finish the old setup for you manually.

Old Step 2.  Change the nameserver for your domain name[Deprecated]

Every domain name on the internet needs to be mapped to an IP address.  The IP address represents the server where the website is being hosted.  When a user browses to that domain name in his browser, the browser looks up the IP address for that domain in order to access the actual website.

This lookup is performed by special computers on the internet called "nameservers".  Each nameserver has a lookup table which maps certain domain names to their IP addresses.  By completing Step 1 above, you have already added your custom domain and its new IP address into our nameservers' lookup tables.  But now you actually have to tell your domain registrar (the place where your domain is registered) to use our nameservers instead of its own to do the lookup. Our nameservers are:

ns1.ourschoolpages.com
ns2.ourschoolpages.com
ns3.ourschoolpages.com
ns4.ourschoolpages.com

The reason for having four nameservers is just redundancy ... in case one goes offline for some reason, the others can still be used to do the lookup, so your website remains accessible.

Unfortunately, every domain registrar handles this differently.  If your domain registrar's website allows you to change the nameservers yourself, then feel free to go ahead and do so.  Otherwise, you may need to call their customer service representative, and ask them to do it for you.  For specific instructions related to your own domain registrar, look under the Related Topics to the left, and see if your domain registrar is listed.

Old Step 3.  Verify everything is working

Note:  After you've completed both of the above steps, usually it can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 4 hours before these changes have propagated to the necessary DNS servers throughout the internet.  So, it's safest to wait about 4 hours before trying to verify the changes.  Even if things appear to be working sooner, it's important to verify again after 4 hours, and yet again after 8 hours.

• Verify your website by opening a new browser window, and entering your custom domain (e.g., "lakesidepta.org") into the Address bar.  If everything is working, it should automatically take you to the home page of your Our School Pages website.
• Verify that you can sign in as the Administrator by clicking the Admin link in the upper-right.  
• Verify that your email accounts are still working.  If you own any email accounts associated with your domain (e.g., "president@lakesidepta.org"), it is very important to make sure those email accounts still work.  Send a test email from your personal email account to each of the email addresses associated with your domain.  In the test email, ask for a reply from the recipient.  If you don't receive a reply, follow up individually with the account owners to make sure they received the test email.