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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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.
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.
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