Knowledgebase

Types of DNS Records

There are a number of different DNS records that you can create or modify to meet your own needs. You can add the follow records either through our client area or through cPanel > Advanced DNS Editor. There are many more types of DNS records avaliable, however, this is a brief overview of the kind of information that each record provides.

CNAME Records

CNAME records provide domain aliasing, which allows you to point one domain at another domain. They are often useful for redirecting traffic from one domain to another, but cannot be used if the name being directed is a CNAME. MX records cannot reference CNAME-defined hostnames.

NS Records

NS records point a domain or any subdomain at an authoritative DNS name server. The name server will then publish the authoritative record for that domain or subdomain.

MX Records

MX records (or 'Mail Exchange' records) provide information regarding mail servers for the routing of mail traffic to the appropriate mail servers. MX records must point at a QDN that's resolvable by DNS.

You can delegate MX records for any domain that you control to any mail server running on any domain, as long as that domain is publicly resolvable. Often, MX records for a domain are created to point to the mail.example.com record, but if you host more than one domain you may wish to simplify your setup by only hosting a mail server on one domain/one machine. Alternately, you may wish to delegate mail for your domain to some third party email service provider.

It's important to remember that MX records identify the hostnames to which mail will route. They must point to resolvable hostnames.

A or AAAA Records

An A record point domain and subdomains to an IP address. These are the fundamental records of the DNS zone, as it performs the main routing of all the names.

The only difference between A and AAAA records is that A records are used for IPv4 addresses, whereas AAAA records are used for IPv6 addresses.

TXT Records

TXT records provide human and machine readable values into the DNS record to support the first revision of SPF (Sender Policy Framework) - which is a method of verifying the authenticity of an email sender.

There are only a handful of uses for TXT Records.

SRV Records

Service records (SRV records) provide information about specific services running on your domain. They may contain information regarding not only service name, but also TCP port as well. A common use of SRV records is for using Jabber/XMPP servers between domain names.

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