DNS, A Records, CNAME Records, and MX Records explained

The A in A Record stands for Address and is the simplest and most primary type of DNS record used. The A Record maps a domain to the specific IP address of the computing hosting the domain. For example, if our Pod Creative name server’s IP address was 123.45.67.890 our A record would point our domain, podcreative.ca, to that specific IP address.

Canonical Names, better known as CNAME, are aliases that tie two domain names together. Sounds a bit confusing, right? It’s pretty straightforward! If you were to type into your browser podcreative.ca you would be automatically directed to https://podcreative.ca, which is our canonical domain, by the DNS because of the CNAME records. CNAME records always point to another CNAME or to an A Record. This means if the IP address mapped to that canonical domain changes, your CNAME records will still work because they point to the root domain.

MX records are nice and straightforward, they deal with sending emails. MX records tell the DNS where a particular email address is located. They point to mail servers and help route emails to their appropriate destinations. 

There are really only a few situations in which you might need to access your A Records, as once your site is up and running they typically stay the same. The three main reasons you would be changing your A Records would be when changing web hosts, changing your domain, or if you created a subdomain.

When you change your hosting provider you may need to have your A Records adjusted to ensure the DNS records point your domain name to the new IP address.

For instance, if you change your domain like a client of ours recently did, you will need your A Records updated. We updated their A Records to point the new domain to the same location on our web server as the old domain. By going through this process with your new domain your existing content and history of the site will be preserved.

When creating a subdomain, for example, let’s say shop.podcreative.ca, the A records need to be generated for this subdomain to point users to your server.

CNAME records are a critical component of the DNS and allow domains to be pointed towards one another instead of towards an IP address. There are two main reasons you might need to access or create new CNAME Records. 

First, to set up separate hostnames for email or FTPs. By changing your CNAME Records they would become ftp.yourdomain.com and mail.yourdomain.com. 

Secondly, you would access and adjust your CNAME Records if you want to point addresses with different Top Level Domains towards a “main” domain. While this sounds confusing, it’s really not. Let’s say your main domain is yourdomain.com, and you have registered yourdomain.ca, yourdomain.org, yourdomain.ed, yourdomain.gov etc. All of these TLD’s can be pointed towards the same “main” domain of yourdomain.com utilizing CNAME Records! 

Accessing your MX records is not for the faint of heart! MX Records deal directly with your domain-related email and should not be accessed unless absolutely necessary. The main, and only reason really, for accessing your MX Records is to deal with email aggregation. Any email aggregator that takes functionality away from the server onto a cloud-based program requires MX Record manipulation.

For example, if you use Gsuite or Microsoft 365 you will need to adjust your MX Records accordingly. Again, this is not something we recommend just anyone doing, as it is extremely easy to make a mistake and detrimentally affect your email.

Nameservers are part of the Domain Name System and help your browser link domain names to IP addresses. This way, instead of remembering long strings of numbers you can type in an easy to remember domain name! DNS is a large database containing information about domain names and their related IP addresses. Nameservers use these DNS records to resolve the names we are familiar with into numbers the browser can use. 

Without nameservers, you’d need to remember numbers such as this,123.45.67.890,  for every site you needed to visit. Although we might rely on names rather than numbers to access websites, browsers still need a way to understand the IP addresses that these more intuitive identifiers point to.

There are only three scenarios in which you would be changing your nameservers entirely. 

Firstly, if you registered your domain with a company different from the one that hosts the website you want it to point to. For us, we use GreenGeeks to register our domains, however, our hosting provider is Lexicom, a different company, thus we need to change the nameservers every time we register a new domain. 

Secondly, we change nameservers when we move new clients onto our hosting provider. Part of the migration process new clients sites go through is a nameserver change. Often times we will migrate their domain to GreenGeeks first, then change the nameservers to our hosting provider. 

Thirdly, and least common, you want to set up custom nameservers. Custom nameservers are associated with your domain rather than your web host. If you are using a dedicated server or a Virtual Private Server to host your site you may be required to create a custom name server.

While changing your name server can be straightforward, we don’t recommend just anyone mucking about. Making an error when adjusting nameservers can be detrimental. If you need your nameservers changed, call us! We can take care of all your hosting needs, including nameservers, A Records, MX Records, and CNAME Records.