What is a CNAME record?
Article Details
URL:
http://www.w3helpdesk.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=68
Article ID:
68
Created On:
13 Apr 2010 4:06 PM
Answer
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 "mydomain.com" may be both a web-server and an ftp-server, so two CNAME-records are defined:
"www.mydomain.com" = "mydomain.com" and "ftp.mydomain.com" = "mydomain.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.mydomain.com".
A CNAME-record should always point to an A-record to avoid circular references