With Ontraport, you can (and should!) use your own domain for membership sites, to host pages, send email, track your visitors and more.

The following are our BASIC RECOMMENDED SETTINGS for the two most common situations.

If you have more sophisticated needs, please refer to this page about hosting Pages and this page about setting up your email.

Situation 1: Brand New Domain Name

Use this method for the quickest and easiest setup if:

  1. You’re using your domain name for the first time, and…
  2. Nothing else is being hosted on it yet, and…
  3. You don’t have an email account set up yet, and…
  4. You’d like to use Gmail for your email.

If the above situation describes you, then..

  • Log in to your registrar and navigate to DNS settings.
  • Set your nameservers to ns1.ontraport.com and ns2.ontraport.com, like this (Godaddy screenshot, but similar in all other registrars):
  • Contact Ontraport support and tell them, “I pointed my nameservers to Ontraport and I’d like a DNS SPECIAL on my new domain [YourNewDomain.com].”
    They’ll know that this means they should set up your tracking domain, SPF, DKIM and Dmarc records. They’ll also point your MX records to Google, so you can use Gmail as a personal inbox with this domain.
    This will also allow you to use this domain for hosting Pages and Membership Sites using Ontraport.
    Sweet setup.

Situation 2: Domain already in use (or will be) by other services

Some people want to give Ontraport only partial control over their domain. In that case, you have a few more settings to handle the recommended setup.

Note that this is just the basic recommended setup, and that you can actually do this in lots of ways. See the pages linked above for more information on advanced use cases.

PLEASE ALSO NOTE: Your DNS settings are critical and messing them up can really do a number on things. If you’re not comfortable with these settings, we recommend getting qualified help such as an engineer or an Ontraport Certified Expert.

Here’s how to do it:

  • Log in to your registrar and navigate to DNS settings.
  • Create these 5 (or 6) DNS records:
    1. Type: CNAME
      Name/Host: smtp.yourdomain.com
      IP/Content/Points to: returnpath.ontramail.com
      TTL: Leave it at whatever the default is, or change to 1 hour. Same for all below.
      At Godaddy, this will look like this (if your domain were yourdomain.com, but put your actual domain there).
    2. Type: A
      Name/Host: pages.yourdomain.com
      IP/Content/Points to: 209.170.211.187
      At Godaddy, this will look like this (if your domain were yourdomain.com, but put your actual domain there).
    3. Type: A
      Name/Host: *.pages.yourdomain.com
      IP/Content/Points to: 209.170.211.187
    4. Type: A
      Name/Host: go.yourdomain.com
      IP/Content/Points to: 209.170.211.187
    5. Type: Txt
      Name/Host: ontramail._domainkey
      Value: “v=DKIM1;k=rsa; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDiHV+GFJUPAtmIh26KHbn5PZXEFm3XK2XjEs4HFOSDZthULWyGvI5CqfYmNm7LFTWC3v5m6CtbLeNgDu0RwTw+94TSryL4ZYC6PESaJCHurmpREZTh+UFlLliRip3reqrNfoYpkiWa6fgu9vbyZob+W3d+leBP/p0mmOXeJiOjKwIDAQAB;”
    6. This one is OPTIONAL and recommended but ONLY if you know what you’re doing. (Do NOT add this record if you don’t know what Dmarc is and know what it’ll do.)
      Type: TXT
      Name/Host: _dmarc
      Value: v=DMARC1; p=none; pct=100; rua=mailto:youremail@yourdomain.com; aspf=r; sp=none;
  • Contact support and tell them, “I’ve set up all the basic records and I’d like a DNS LITE set up on my new domain [YourDomain.com].”
    They will know that this means you want to use pages.yourdomain.com for hosting pages, and smtp.yourdomain.com as your ReturnPath, and go.yourdomain.com for your tracking links and they’ll set all that up for you.

Once that’s done, you’ll be able to use any permutation of your pages.yourdomain.com link to host Pages in Ontraport. For example, the following will all work if you simply type them in to the ‘use my domain’ setting of the Publish dialog in Pages:

  1. pages.mydomain.com/myPageName or pages.mydomain.com/AnotherPageName, etc
  2. subdomainname.pages.mydomain.com
  3. pages.mydomain.com/foldername/anotherpage
  4. And so on…

Also, your emails will be sent from smtp.yourdomain.com and you’ll begin to build your own sender reputation.

Of course, you can always point as many additional domain names (or subdomains) to Ontraport as you like and use them in the same ways.

That’s all there is to it! Nice work!