A (Address) Record

An A record tells a DNS server what specific IP address to map for a host name. It is the most common type of DNS record. An A record is typically used to direct your domain name, for example www.exampledomainname.com, to a web server. These host records can be used to direct your domain name to your web server’s IP address (via A or AAAA records)

Example A record format: 216.239.38.21

AAAA (IPv6 Address) Record

An AAAA (or “quad-A”) record is similar to an A record, except that it maps a hostname to an IPv6 address. An A record specifies an IPv4 address, which is currently the dominant Internet Protocol version. In 1998 the IETF designated IPv6 as the successor to version 4 mainly for its much larger amount of available addresses, which provides flexibility in allocated addresses and routing traffic and prevents address exhaustion as more and more hosts are connecting to the Internet and available IPv4 addresses are running out.

IPv6 addresses are normally written as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits, where each group is separated by a colon.

Example IPv6 format: 2006:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

The post A Record: What is it? How is it used? first appeared on Cloud Engineer - Everton Collins.

CNAME record – A Canonical Name record (abbreviated as CNAME record) is a type of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS) used to specify that a domain name is an alias for another domain, the “canonical” domain.

All information, including subdomains, IP addresses, etc., are defined by the canonical domain.

To use CNAME records, select CNAME from the Add Record. 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.exampledomainname.com to point to exampledomainname.com you could put www in the name field and @ in the alias for field.

Restrictions

• A CNAME must have no other records of other types (MX, A, etc). This is very important especially with the @ record. If you specify a CNAME record type for the @ hostname, then email will not route properly for this domain name.
• CNAME records that point to other CNAME records should be avoided. It is possible to create infinite loops and other error conditions.
• Other DNS record types that point to other names, such as NS, MX, PTR, and SRV should never point to a CNAME.

Example CNAME record format: www CNAME www.exampledomainname.com

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