Where Websites Come To Life
What is a CNAME record?
Posted: May 14th, 2018
CNAME stands for Canonical Name. CNAME records can be used to alias one name to another.
For example, if you have a server where you keep all of your documents online, it might normally be accessed through docs.example.com. You may also want to access it through documents.example.com. One way to make this possible is to add a CNAME record that points documents.example.com to docs.example.com. When someone visits documents.example.com they will see the exact same content as docs.example.com.
In addition, CNAME records are referred to as alias records since they map an alias to its canonical name. CNAME records allow an administrator to point multiple systems to one IP without specifically assigning an A record to each host name. If your server IP ever changes, you only have to change one A record’s IP address to update all associated records.
Add a CNAME record
To use CNAME records, select CNAME from the Add Record drop down in the advanced editor. Then enter the hostname you would like to alias from and the fully-qualified domain name you would like to alias to. You may also enter @ in the Alias for field to represent the domain itself.
For example, if the domain were example.com and you wanted www.example.com to point to example.com you could put www in the name field and @ in the alias for field.
Part of article sourced from DNSimple.com.