What is a CNAME? Print

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CNAME-records are domain name aliases.

 

Often computers on the Internet have multiple functions such as web-server, ftp-server, chat-server etc.

 

To mask this, CNAME-records can be used to give a single computer multiple names (aliases).  For example computer "xyz.com" may be both a web-server and an ftp-server, so two CNAME-records are defined:

 

"www.xyz.com" = "xyz.com" and "ftp.xyz.com" = "xyz.com".

 

Sometimes a single server computer hosts many different domain names (take ISPs), and so CNAME-records may be defined such as "www.abc.com" = "www.xyz.com".

 

A CNAME-record should always point to an A-record to avoid circular references.

 


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