DNS CNAME records are more popular than you might think. It's one of the most popular records and has multiple uses. Whether you want to redirect your website, return your IP address to localhost, or something completely different, you can use DNS CNAME Record.
What Is a CNAME Record?
A CNAME record maps an alias name to another/canonical domain name. CNAME records are normally used to map a subdomain, such as www to the domain. For example, a CNAME record can map the domain www.mysite.com to the actual domain mysite.com.
Note that it's essential that the hostname matches what is in the CNAME record (aside from any wildcards or variables). If there's any ambiguity about whether or not the domain name matches, DNS will return an error, and your browser won't be able to access it at all!
What Is CNAME Used for?
The primary purpose of using a CNAME record is to make it easy for clients and search engines to find your website by its domain name without knowing the IP address that corresponds with each server on your server farm.
The benefit of using a CNAME record is that it allows you to take advantage of the DNS caching capabilities of most modern Internet browsers and web servers. In addition, your users will see faster page loads since they don't need to request the same information repeatedly from several different hosts.
Besides, you can use a CNAME record to cache an entire website or page on the Internet by setting it up so that your web server will always look up www. yourdomain.com. This is useful for sites with large numbers of visitors but doesn't need to serve every visitor from an individual server (e.g., Facebook).
If you have a large site and can host it yourself, this can be an effective solution for fast-loading pages for users who just want to browse through content quickly without downloading anything.
How Does CNAME Work?
A CNAME record is an alias record that points to another domain name. When you choose a CNAME record, you tell the system which other domain name should be associated with your current one. This can be useful when you want to point a custom subdomain at a specific site or service but don't want to remember your website's exact IP address.
You can also use this feature for static websites and web applications that might not need to change often because they aren't updated as frequently as blog posts or news articles.
Conclusion
So now you know how to use CNAME records to make simple redirects. But why would you use a CNAME record instead of an A record? Well, there's one primary reason: changing all your other DNS records every time you need to add or remove an alias can be annoying and time-consuming.