What is the Difference Between a CNAME Record, A Record, and Redirect?

  • July 11, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

An A record is the actual record. The name is resolved to the corresponding IP address.

An example of this is www.no-ip.com resolves to 204.16.252.112

CNAME records (short for short for canonical name) map your hostname to another hostname. It is useful for pointing many hosts to the same place and updating them easily.

An example of this is:

www.no-ip.com to www.noip.com

This is a CNAME record because even though the domains are different, they still go to exactly the same place and follow the same rules that are in place.

Redirects are like CNAME records in a way, but different.  Use a redirect if you want one domain to redirect to another.

An example of this is:

www.yourwebsite.com redirects to yourblog.blog.com

Have questions or comments about CNAME records, A records or redirects? Leave them below.

Want to know more about No-IP’s services? Check out our website to learn more.

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4 Comments.
  1. Tommy
    July 20, 2011·

    I am not sure what the difference is between a CNAME and a REDIRECT. Please give more details on how a REDIRECT works.

  2. aida
    November 11, 2012·

    Hello There,

    I wanted to redirect my website to www version, and I have been told that i can add a records to point both french-recipes.net and http://www.french-recipes.net to the same IP address which i have done and it’s workign ok! but I wanna know if this will cause any issue in the future? and am i suppose to add cname instead of a record for doing this?

    Thanks

    Cheers

    Aida

  3. Paul
    January 17, 2013·

    If speaking about REDIRECT your browser switches to the redirected domain and you can see it in a while in a browser`s address line instead of the one you put initially. In a case of using ALIAS a browser`s address line does not change.

  4. Tina Hicks
    March 21, 2016·

    Thanks for your help it is much appreciated

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