Domains outside of ncsu.edu may be purchased and hosted at NC State for a number of reasons, such as multi-university research projects, protecting intellectual property, helping NC State groups collaborate with colleagues outside the university, and minimizing confusion. It is very important to follow the appropriate process in these cases.
Before you purchase such a domain, we strongly encourage you to consult with the appropriate IT and communications personnel within your unit and related units in order to avoid unforeseen issues arising from the use of that domain.
Per Rule https://policies.ncsu.edu/rule/rul-08-00-15/:
All such domains must be used for legitimate university-related activities and must be approved by NC State University.
Approvals are done by the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology (VCIT) and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Communications (AVCC) or their designees.
Please fill out the Domain Approval Form for your chosen domain. Note that to comply with Brand standards, you may be asked to modify the requested domain, so do not purchase the domain until it is approved.
Note: The approval process completes with just the approval. You may need to open additional incidents for hosting, DNS, or certificate configuration.
Before going through the Registration process, it is important to know where you will be hosting the domain. Sometimes, a domain registration is part of adoption of a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, and other times it is to host a content-based website. If the goal is to host a website, we recommend you review the information on Get On The Web and contact your planned hosting provider before purchasing your domain. In many cases, you can get a staging URL before purchasing your domain to ensure that you can be as efficient as possible with your funding.
Note: If you are looking to migrate a pre-existing website, it is very important to work with the hosting provider on the migration process to avoid causing any outages on the current site.
Once you have completed the Approval process and have your hosting provider, you will need to purchase the domain from a Registrar. OIT does not provide a registration service; that is the responsibility of the requesting unit.
Note: Not all Registrars will allow you to modify the DNS configuration -- if you plan to have your domain hosted at NC State you will have to point DNS at NCSU's DNS servers.
When registering the domain, it is recommended that you use a Google Generic account or a Google Group as the registration email address and login. Domain registrations may be for up to 10 years, and the person who registers the domain may no longer be with the university at the point where the registration needs to be renewed. Using a Generic or Google Group for the registration email and login will help to avoid any outages when it is time for renewal.
Assuming the site will be hosted at NC State, when completing the registration process, you will need to set the following information as part of the registration:
Name Server: ed11.ddi.ncsu.edu 152.1.14.149
Name Server: ed21.ddi.ncsu.edu 152.1.14.157
Name Server: ed31.ddi.ncsu.edu 20.119.232.109
Tech Name: Host Master
Tech Organization: NC State University
Tech Street1: 2114 Avent Ferry Rd.
Tech Street2: Campus Box 7208
Tech Street3:
Tech City: Raleigh
Tech State/Province: North Carolina
Tech Postal Code: 27695
Tech Country: US
Tech Phone: +1.9195155500
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email: hostmaster@ncsu.edu
This will make NC State's DNS servers authoritative for the domain.
Note: If you are looking to migrate a pre-existing website, this will cause a cut over and may cause an outage if the other components are not already completed.
At this point, your domain has been registered and NC State's DNS is authoritative. You still need DNS configuration in place. Working with your hosting provider, you will need to contact OIT Comtech to create the DNS zone within the campus DNS servers and point it at the infrastructure that will be hosting the domain.
Once that is complete, your hosting provider will need to work with OIT Security and Compliance to complete a Domain Control Validation (DCV) of the domain with InCommon/Sectigo, our certificate provider. This will allow the TLS certificate used for securing the website to be created.
Once the domain is registered, hosted, in DNS, and a certificate provisioned and installed, your website should available.
Domain Squatting - In most cases, NC State does not host multiple domains for the same site, also known as "Domain Squatting". This is when you register the same domain with multiple spellings, in multiple top-level zones, and so forth. This actually hurts Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and generally pollutes brand identity in addition to requiring additional configuration and increasing complexity.
eMail - In some cases, units are wanting a non-ncsu.edu domain to also host email addresses using that domain. NC State does not host additional email domains for non-ncsu.edu projects. If you have questions about this, please contact the Google Service team at oit_google@help.ncsu.edu.