ELI5… CNAME, DNS, Domain

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For background….I’m working on connecting our shopify to our business, and in the process some wires got crossed and our main domain is gone and replaced with our shop.

I feel like the problem lies in domain/DNS settings and CNAME but I don’t actually know what these things do. We’re supposed to have a tab that routes to shopify, not have our whole website replaced with Shopify. I’m not super technologically savvy so can someone explain what Domain, DNS, and CNAME is/does?

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12 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s whole books dedicated to DNS. But the ELI5 is this: DNS basically just stores records that map a name to an IP, or vice versa. DNS means Domain Name System. An A ‘ record’ is used when the question is ‘what is the ip for reddit.com. the IP is the answer. A CNAME record is like an A record, but it’s for an alternate name. A domain is a text string like “reddit.com” where .com is a domain and reddit is a sub domain. There are DNS servers that only have records for .com. there are other dns servers that only have records for reddit.com

The whole idea is to provide a means for humans to remember and understand addresses for resources on the internet. Reddit.com is intuitive for us where it’s IP means nothing to a human.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The internet runs on IP addresses. Each computer has an address like a home, but nobody wants to remember individual addresses or type them in their browser. So we use names to represent the IP addresses. DNS is the directory that converts the name to an IP address. So mom’s house can be converted to 234 West Avenue, Brigham NJ.

A cname is just another name for “mom’s house”. Maybe it’s “blue house #2”. When you look for it, it just becomes “mom’s house” and then the address.

So for the internet, names are organized as domain names. Think reddit.com. That’s a domain name, and so would wikipedia.org. If you want to connect to a specific server(s) named “directory” or “www”, it would be “www.reddit.com” or “directory.wikipedia.org”. If you want people to be able to also use “lookup” to hit your directory server, you would add a cname of “lookup.wikipedia.org” to point to “directory.wikipedia.org”. A cname is also called an “alias”.

Many companies are authorized to sell domain names for the various top level domains like “com”, “org”, “tv”, etc. You purchase a domain name from a company like namecheap, godaddy, network solutions, etc. They then register your domain name for you and tell the DNS root servers where to find your DNS server for your domain. This can either be something you host, hosted at the company that you registered with, or hosted at a third party. You then set up the DNS records/names that point to your server’s public IP addresses.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s whole books dedicated to DNS. But the ELI5 is this: DNS basically just stores records that map a name to an IP, or vice versa. DNS means Domain Name System. An A ‘ record’ is used when the question is ‘what is the ip for reddit.com. the IP is the answer. A CNAME record is like an A record, but it’s for an alternate name. A domain is a text string like “reddit.com” where .com is a domain and reddit is a sub domain. There are DNS servers that only have records for .com. there are other dns servers that only have records for reddit.com

The whole idea is to provide a means for humans to remember and understand addresses for resources on the internet. Reddit.com is intuitive for us where it’s IP means nothing to a human.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s whole books dedicated to DNS. But the ELI5 is this: DNS basically just stores records that map a name to an IP, or vice versa. DNS means Domain Name System. An A ‘ record’ is used when the question is ‘what is the ip for reddit.com. the IP is the answer. A CNAME record is like an A record, but it’s for an alternate name. A domain is a text string like “reddit.com” where .com is a domain and reddit is a sub domain. There are DNS servers that only have records for .com. there are other dns servers that only have records for reddit.com

The whole idea is to provide a means for humans to remember and understand addresses for resources on the internet. Reddit.com is intuitive for us where it’s IP means nothing to a human.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The internet runs on IP addresses. Each computer has an address like a home, but nobody wants to remember individual addresses or type them in their browser. So we use names to represent the IP addresses. DNS is the directory that converts the name to an IP address. So mom’s house can be converted to 234 West Avenue, Brigham NJ.

A cname is just another name for “mom’s house”. Maybe it’s “blue house #2”. When you look for it, it just becomes “mom’s house” and then the address.

So for the internet, names are organized as domain names. Think reddit.com. That’s a domain name, and so would wikipedia.org. If you want to connect to a specific server(s) named “directory” or “www”, it would be “www.reddit.com” or “directory.wikipedia.org”. If you want people to be able to also use “lookup” to hit your directory server, you would add a cname of “lookup.wikipedia.org” to point to “directory.wikipedia.org”. A cname is also called an “alias”.

Many companies are authorized to sell domain names for the various top level domains like “com”, “org”, “tv”, etc. You purchase a domain name from a company like namecheap, godaddy, network solutions, etc. They then register your domain name for you and tell the DNS root servers where to find your DNS server for your domain. This can either be something you host, hosted at the company that you registered with, or hosted at a third party. You then set up the DNS records/names that point to your server’s public IP addresses.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The internet runs on IP addresses. Each computer has an address like a home, but nobody wants to remember individual addresses or type them in their browser. So we use names to represent the IP addresses. DNS is the directory that converts the name to an IP address. So mom’s house can be converted to 234 West Avenue, Brigham NJ.

A cname is just another name for “mom’s house”. Maybe it’s “blue house #2”. When you look for it, it just becomes “mom’s house” and then the address.

So for the internet, names are organized as domain names. Think reddit.com. That’s a domain name, and so would wikipedia.org. If you want to connect to a specific server(s) named “directory” or “www”, it would be “www.reddit.com” or “directory.wikipedia.org”. If you want people to be able to also use “lookup” to hit your directory server, you would add a cname of “lookup.wikipedia.org” to point to “directory.wikipedia.org”. A cname is also called an “alias”.

Many companies are authorized to sell domain names for the various top level domains like “com”, “org”, “tv”, etc. You purchase a domain name from a company like namecheap, godaddy, network solutions, etc. They then register your domain name for you and tell the DNS root servers where to find your DNS server for your domain. This can either be something you host, hosted at the company that you registered with, or hosted at a third party. You then set up the DNS records/names that point to your server’s public IP addresses.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The interesting thing about CNAME is it’s been used the other way around.

CNAME means “canonical name”, originally intended for websites to have other names then pointed back to “canonical name”. But now it is mostly used to point the canonical name of your website to another name, most often a public hosting provider’s hostname.

For example:

hostname directly to an IP:

whatevershop.com type A response: whatever IP that host this website.

Original usage of CNAME:

whatevershopnickname.com type CNAME response: whatevershop.com , then the resolver try to resolve the latter to the IP.

How it is been used now:

whatevershop.com type CNAME response: whateverthehostingprovidergaveyou.whateverhostingprovider.com, then the resolver try to resolve the latter to an IP, usually owned by that hosting provider.

The shopify provider should give you a corresponding CNAME response that you should talk to your DNS provider to set up, so it’s like yourshop.com CNAME to whatever shopify told you to put in as CNAME, also don’t forget to delete existing A or CNAME records you had for yourshop.com so it stops being resolved to your old server IP or provider hostname.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The interesting thing about CNAME is it’s been used the other way around.

CNAME means “canonical name”, originally intended for websites to have other names then pointed back to “canonical name”. But now it is mostly used to point the canonical name of your website to another name, most often a public hosting provider’s hostname.

For example:

hostname directly to an IP:

whatevershop.com type A response: whatever IP that host this website.

Original usage of CNAME:

whatevershopnickname.com type CNAME response: whatevershop.com , then the resolver try to resolve the latter to the IP.

How it is been used now:

whatevershop.com type CNAME response: whateverthehostingprovidergaveyou.whateverhostingprovider.com, then the resolver try to resolve the latter to an IP, usually owned by that hosting provider.

The shopify provider should give you a corresponding CNAME response that you should talk to your DNS provider to set up, so it’s like yourshop.com CNAME to whatever shopify told you to put in as CNAME, also don’t forget to delete existing A or CNAME records you had for yourshop.com so it stops being resolved to your old server IP or provider hostname.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The interesting thing about CNAME is it’s been used the other way around.

CNAME means “canonical name”, originally intended for websites to have other names then pointed back to “canonical name”. But now it is mostly used to point the canonical name of your website to another name, most often a public hosting provider’s hostname.

For example:

hostname directly to an IP:

whatevershop.com type A response: whatever IP that host this website.

Original usage of CNAME:

whatevershopnickname.com type CNAME response: whatevershop.com , then the resolver try to resolve the latter to the IP.

How it is been used now:

whatevershop.com type CNAME response: whateverthehostingprovidergaveyou.whateverhostingprovider.com, then the resolver try to resolve the latter to an IP, usually owned by that hosting provider.

The shopify provider should give you a corresponding CNAME response that you should talk to your DNS provider to set up, so it’s like yourshop.com CNAME to whatever shopify told you to put in as CNAME, also don’t forget to delete existing A or CNAME records you had for yourshop.com so it stops being resolved to your old server IP or provider hostname.

Anonymous 0 Comments

DNS: Domain Name System. It’s a standard used to match an IP address (a number that uniquely identifies a device on a network, eg. the internet) to a domain name (eg. [reddit.com](https://reddit.com)). The common analogy is a phone book, lookup a name and get the number. When you visit a website in your browser, the computer will use one or more DNS servers to look up the address.

Domain: a human-friendly alias for a network device. Domain names consist of multiple parts separated by dots, take for example `www.reddit.com`. `com` is the Top Level Domain, usually it indicates the type of entity (`com`mercial, non-profit `org`anisation etc) or country of origin (`.“uk`,`.us`). `reddit` is the second-level domain, this is the organisation name, brand, identity etc. Finally there are one or more sub-domains, in this case `www` (World Wide Web ie. a website).

CNAME: A type of record in a DNS server. While an A record is used to match a domain name to the IP address of the server, a CNAME record points a domain name to another domain name that needs to be looked up (hopefully it eventually leads to an A record).

When you signed up for Shopify you were probably told to point your custom business domain name to `shops.myshopify.com` using a CNAME record. If you already have a website at `mybusiness.com` you want to retain, what you want to do is point a *subdomain* to Shopify eg. `shop.mybusiness.com` and have your tab link to that. But that’s a tech support issue that’s not appropriate for ELI5.