Custom Domains

Custom Domains for Padlet for Schools accounts

Your Padlet for Schools' domain is your school's official address. When you sign up for a Padlet for Schools account, a domain is suggested based on your institution name, but you can choose any name you like.

Your Padlet for Schools domain is an important part of your account because it's where every member will access their accounts. If you need to change your domain, we highly suggest you contact Customer Support to make this change for you. If you'd rather do this yourself, you can follow the steps below.

Only the owner of the Padlet for Schools account can change the domain.
  1. From your dashboard, click on your account name in the top-right corner > Settings.
  1. Click Organization info and find the 'Web address' field. This will display your current domain. Type your new domain here by clicking the pencil icon.
  1. Save!

If you must make this change, make sure everyone is informed to avoid confusion and login problems.

Every school subdomain is unique. If it shows an error, indicating that the organization already exists, you'll need to consider adding a number or using a different name for your organization.

If there's a domain your organization needs to claim, please contact us. We may be able to help!

Changing the domain will change the links to your padlets and all the users' padlets within the Padlet for Schools account. However, all original links will automatically forward to the new URL!

**Note: If you created custom links in place of the originals before the domain change, they will not automatically forward and you will need to contact us and request a redirection.
The URL to log in to your Padlet for Schools account will change if you change your domain! All padlets within the account will automatically forward to their new location so that links do not break. Your domain URL will not automatically forward.

If your domain was originally myschoolhere.padlet.org and you change it to myschoolisthebest.padlet.org -- and a user goes to the 'myschoolhere' link, they will receive an error. They must use the new domain at 'myschoolisthebest.'

Be sure to inform all members in your account to use the new domain to log in.

Setting up a custom domain

In a nutshell, you'll need to log into your domain name registrar and add an A record for your custom domain. Point the A record to 107.178.251.177 and set a TTL for 30 min.

For this article, we'll use Namecheap. We also have instructions for those who've registered with Gandi.net here.

  1. Log in to Namecheap and go to the dashboard.
  2. Your domains should be listed. Click on Manage beside the primary domain you would like to point to a padlet.
  1. Go to Advanced DNS.
  1. Click Add New Record.
  1. Enter the details as illustrated in the screenshot below.
  1. Click Save all changes. The image above illustrates what we mean, with some additional elaboration.

Let's say I own the domain "school.com", and I would like to point "mybeautiful.school.com'' to my padlet. I need to add an A record, as shown in the screenshot.

If I would like to point "school.com" directly to my padlet, replace "school.com with "@".

If you already have an existing A record with a hostname set to "beautiful" or "@" pointing to another IP address (e.g., 127.0.0.1), you must delete it first. The custom mapping only works if you have a single A record for the given hostname.

That's it! You might have to wait a bit since these changes take a while to propagate.

Mapping to a custom domain

We can help you map your padlet to a domain. All you have to do is provide us with these details:

  • Your Custom Domain (e.g. hellopadlet.com) or a subdomain (e.g. about.hellopadlet.com)
  • The Padlet URL - The URL must be a specific padlet the user owns (e.g. padlet.com/hellopadlet/about). We do not allow mapping of tenant accounts such as Padlet for Schools (e.g. hellopadlet.padlet.org) or a user profile (e.g. padlet.com/hellopadlet).

In short, we do not support the mapping of a path (the part that comes after a /).

  • The Registrar name of your domain (e.g godaddy.com)

And that's basically it! Send your request here.

We do not support SSL (https) for custom domain mappings at the moment.

FAQs

Some of my links are broken after changing my domain! How do I fix them?
All original links will forward to the new location automatically after changing your domain unless:

*You created a custom link to a padlet at some point before changing your domain
*You are trying to access the domain itself (not a padlet)

Custom links and your Padlet for Schools domain (i.e. myschoolhere.padlet.org) will not automatically forward to the new location. To request a redirection so that it will automatically forward, contact us here!


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