Understanding DNS record types

Understanding DNS Record Types

When you first try to manage your domains DNS, everything may seem very confusing. Do not panic! DNS records can be intimidating, but they will not be as complex as you feel them. Below are explanations of more common types.

A Records: These are also called address records or sometimes host records. Recording is allowed only at IP addresses. These records point your domain to the IP address of your website or hosting. Suppose you own the domain name name.com, which is hosted by us, and the IP address of your hosting server is 127.0.0.1. Usually you have two DNS records to indicate your domain hosting, which look like this:

A name.com 127.0.0.1

A *.name.com 127.0.0.1

The first A record in this example points to the bare version of your domain. This means that when someone enters their browser and enters the domain name without www, he goes to the desired server and website. The second entry, A, is a wildcard version. This redirects any subdomains to your domain to the server; this includes www, and everything else that people can type in front of your domain name.

If you have any specific subdomains for which you need to set records, you will also do this with records A in the same way. So, if in the above example you want to create a subdomain named test.name.com, then you must create an A record that looks like this:

A test.name.com 127.0.0.1

Using this method, you can also specify subdomains on servers other than your main site, depending on your needs.

CNAME Records : CNAME means a record of canonical names. CName entries are only allowed for domains and subdomains. A CNAME record points one of your subdomains to another domain name. CNAME cannot be installed on your bare domain! You can create a CNAME record at www.name.com, but not just at name.com. One thing that CNAME records are commonly used for is redirecting part of your site to a site that you created elsewhere, such as an online store or something similar.

MX Records: MX stands for Mail Exchange. An MX record allows text, not IP, recordings. These records are used to forward emails sent to your domain name to the correct server, and then send them to your specific email address. Your email provider will provide you with the necessary MX records for your email. If you have an email with Name.com, you can use our DNS templates to automatically add the necessary records. Remember that your domain can only have one set of MX records. All your mail should be sent to the same place, and then sorted from there. This means that you cannot have two separate email providers in the same domain. It also means that any email forwarding that you configure must be configured by your email provider and not in the domain itself.

TXT Records: TXT just means text. These records do not change anything in your domain, but you can search for them in your domain. These records are typically used by services such as Google, which will ask you to add a character string to a TXT record so that they can search for the record and verify that you own the domain or have access to the domain’s DNS records.