.edu domain

Prestige Student Information Systems

Your school’s web site is one of the public faces of your organization.  The website look, feel, data and information affect your brand and public perception.  As a school, it is a best-practice recommendation to have a .edu domain name.  

Read on to learn more about what a domain name is, why it matters, and how to get one.

Why does the domain name matter?

As a school, having a .edu domain adds a sense of professionalism and makes your school more easily recognizable to potential students as an educational institution. It also has numerous other benefits, such as:

• It qualifies your organization for education institution classification. This can help with certain discounts or tools that are available for educaitonal institutions. For example, Google provides free Google suite licenses, and Microsoft offers specials on Office365 licenses for students.

• .edu domains typically have higher Google PageRank results because they are from higher quality sites. This results in more traffic to your site and ultimately in more enrollments.

What is a domain name?

If you look behind the scenes, a website is built like a collection of individual documents, much like a documents folder on your computer.  Every time you add a new page, you're adding a new document to the file folder.  

If you edit the page, such as adding a picture or changing the words, you open up one of the documents (one of the pages on your website), change it, and then save it.  

The public will find your website by its address, which is your domain name. One example is www.benes.edu. In other words, the domain name is the address someone would type into their browser to get to your website.

When someone gets to the website, they're able to see the folder (the main website) and all of the individual documents (the pages on your website).

There's one additional piece of the puzzle to be aware of. The folder needs to be put onto the internet in order to be a website available for other people to see. A web hosting company does just that - 'host' your website. In other words, a web hosting company takes the site information and puts it on the internet so that others can find and view it.

Setting up a website

The standard process to set up a webpage is to go to a company like Godaddy, Bluehost, or Weebly. These companies do everything for you in one stop - you get a domain name, it is hosted, and the user (you or your team) can create the website on their platform.

Domain names usually end with .com, .org or .net, but recently, a huge number of domain extensions (the end part of the web address, like .com) have come out, ranging from .agency to .pizza.

The challenge to this process is the .edu domain name.  The US Department of Commerce has granted one company, Educause, the ability to create new EDU domain names.  This change was to ensure that only eligible institutions are able to hold a .edu domain name.  This is why you cannot see the moniker of .edu on Godaddy or any domain service, as they are unable to request one for you.  

However, because Educause only does the verification and awarding of the .edu domain name to the school, they do not do hosting.  So, once your school has gotten a .edu domain name, the school then needs to find a service that points the address to the correct file location and one that will host the web site.

Email management is usually provided by the web hosting company.  They charge per email account and a fee for management.  

Google has a great service for schools identified by the .edu address. Their service provides free Google accounts - including Gmail, Drive (cloud storage), document, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Setting up the service requires a few simple steps and can allow your school access to a lot of free or discounted programs. Not to be outdone, Microsoft offers free Office365 accounts, with storage for every student and staff registered with an .edu account.  

To make this more tangible, here is a summary of how our school, Bene’s Career Academy, is set up:

• The domain name is provided by Educause

• The DNS address, and named server is hosted by hostmysite.com

• Our website is hosted by Weebly.com

• Our emails and email addresses are managed by Google

We'll walk you through how to do this below.

Step-by-Step Directions for Setting Up Your Website

STEP #1: Find and register your Domain Name

If you’re making a website for your school, your domain name should match your school name. For example: YourSchoolName.edu.

We suggest picking a single word, or combining two words into a single word for the domain name.  For example, www.Benes.edu.

Getting the .edu domain requires 4 steps.

1. Check to see if you are eligible

2. Check to see if the name is available

3. Manage the domain

4. Pay the yearly fee

Eligibility:

If your school is on the list of accredited institutions, then you are eligible to request an .edu domain.  As a NACCAS, AACS, or other nationally or state accredited institution, your name should be on their listing.    

Only U.S. postsecondary institutions that are institutionally accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies (see recognized accrediting bodies) may obtain an Internet name in the .edu domain. These include both "Regional Institutional Accrediting Agencies" and "National Institutional and Specialized Accrediting Bodies" recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

Applying for the domain name:

The first step is to request the domain name.  

Go to the Educause site: https://net.educause.edu/request-domain.htm

Scroll down on the page to the entry box near the bottom.  

Enter your school name, or the name you want to use for your new web site address, then click "Register".  

           The domain name is the  _______school name______.edu

For example for our school we entered:  "Prestige" and the system checked to see if Prestige.edu was available. The system will tell you if your name is available.  If the name is not available, try a different variation. In our case, the name is available:

Click "Add to Cart" and proceed with the registration process. You will receive an email notifying you of the request for the domain.  In one or two days you will receive an email confirming your new address and requesting you to return to the site to pay the fee for registering the domain name.

Your account will be managed at the Educause website. This includes entering the named servers (the next step) and paying the bill.

STEP #2: Register the DNS with a hosting service

You need to identify a named server.  This is where the domain name will be forwarded to.

We use Hostmysite.com to manage the DNS named servers, but there are many options like Godaddy or others.

The named server provider gives you a set (3) of server names that you will enter into the Educause page.  This is how Educause knows where to send traffic for your site.

Once you determine where you site will be hosted/managed, you point the named servers to the host location.  

We use Weebly for our web design and hosting.  Once you set up an account with a web host, set up the forwarded IP address on the DNS host.

On hostmysite.com, we also entered settings for our email. Once your Google account is setup, you specify the mail forwarding settings to control Google email.

Conclusion:

There are lots of benefits to having a .edu domain name. Hopefully this document helps your organization get started with accomplishing this task.

If not, we at Prestige are happy to help you.  It’s what we do: we are school owners that have spent years mixing technology and management know how to develop a school empowerment system that made running our schools easy, efficient, and powerful.  

Now we have a mission to help other schools like ours grow their business and impact. Find more information here: Prestige SIS.