In Between Dreams

A blog by Ritul Jain

October 1, 2022

Introduction to Domain Hosting Terminology

I was working on connecting my personal domain www.rituljain.com which was hosted on Namecheap to WordPress by following an online guide. The guide had instructions to add a bunch of things like : NS Record, CNAME Record, A Record to my parent domain settings.

I wasn’t sure of what any of those meant so started to dive deep to understand what they are and found a bunch of useful information. This article is just a brain dump of things that i think will be useful for anyone who is getting started with the entire “Web Hosting” thing.

Before getting started with the terms, the first thing that we need to know is what DNS is and how it works. (super easy)

Let’s say that you own a set of domains. Each of these domain will have an IP address associated with them. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a network service which stores the mapping between the IP Address and Domain Names – similar to the Contacts app that we have in our smartphones to store mobile numbers.

Web servers query the DNS to get information about the servers.

Getting back to the terminology, Let’s start with the first one, NS Record.

NS Record
NS stands for Nameserver. What do we mean by Nameserver? Nameserver is a server on the Internet specialized in handling queries regarding the location of the domain name’s various services.

Nameserver record indicates which DNS server is authoritative for that domain (i.e. which server contains the actual DNS records). In simpler words, NS records tell the Internet where to go to find out a domain’s IP address. Refer Figure 1.

myawesomewebsite.com	Record Type	Value	TTL
@	NS	ns1.samplenameserver.com	600

Figure 1. Example of an NS Record

The “@” symbol in the examples indicates that this is a record for the root domain.

CNAME Record
A Canonical Name (CNAME) Record is used to create an alias from one domain name to another domain name.

Imagine a scavenger hunt where each clue points to another clue, and the final clue points to the treasure. A domain with a CNAME record is like a clue that can point you to another clue (another domain with a CNAME record) or to the treasure (a domain with an A record).

In my case, I was making use of Github Pages to host my website (its a cool way to host static websites via Git Repos). I had to create a CNAME Record which pointed my domain to the github page. Here’s an example

http://www.rituljain.com	Record Type	Value	TTL
@	CNAME	lutir.github.io	600

Figure 2. Example of a CNAME Record

A Record (This is the best one)
The “A” in A Record stands for Address. This record is used to store the IP Address for a domain. For IPv6 Addresses, we refer to the “AAAA” Record. Here’s an example: