You may use CNAME records to alias one name with another. CNAME stands for Name Canonical.
If both example.com and www.example.com point to the same application and are hosted by the same server, a typical example is. It's popular to build to avoid having two separate records:
As a consequence, example.com points to the IP address of the server, and www.example.com points, via example.com, to the same address. If the IP address changes, all you need to do is update it in one place: just edit the A record for example.com and automatically inherit the changes from www.example.com.
A CNAME record must always point to a separate domain name, never to an IP address directly. If you try pointing a CNAME record to an IP address, you will receive an error.
The DNS A record is specified by RFC 1035.
The layout of an A record follows the standard description of the top-level format established by RFC 1035. The section RDATA consists of one single element:
Domain-name: A domain name which specifies the canonical or primary name for the record.
The canonical representation is:
CNAME <domain-name>
where <domain-name> is a fully-qualified domain name such as example.com.
In DNSimple, the CNAME record is represented by the following customizable elements:
Name: The host name for the record, without the domain name. This is generally referred to as “subdomain”. We automatically append the domain name.
TTL: The time-to-live in seconds. This is the amount of time the record is allowed to be cached by a resolver.
Content: The domain-name the CNAME maps to.
The CNAME record is often mistakenly referred to as a redirect, usually in the form of web redirects (HTTP).
There is no clear connexion between a CNAME and an HTTP redirect, nor does any HTTP redirect result automatically from the CNAME configuration.
The server responding to an HTTP request must be configured to return an acceptable HTTP response in order to execute an HTTP redirection. Using a CNAME is not explicitly feasible.