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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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.
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