: Questions about ANAME DNS records Shopify recently sent a link asking that I update DNS - They talk about ALIAS or ANAME records, and assert these are different to CNAME and A records. I understand

@Shelley277

In internet world, for any DNS record related, a domain usually called by @ ie root for example mycompany.com. But for communicating the domain from outside you require IP (v4 or v6). So advertsing the domain IP to the external world by means of A record, called Name record. Basically it is mapping a static IP to your domain.You may seen some thing like in your hosting ISP DNS entries
@ IP Address
mycompany.com IP Address

You can also use A record for creating subdomain for your domain

abc.mycompany.com IP Address1

def.mycompany.com IP Address2
etc..

Whereas CNAME record is Canonical name ie secondary name for the domain

mycompany.com can also called as ourcompany.com similarly

abc.mycompany.com also called as cba.mycompany.com

so you should have record in A section as

abc.mycompany.com IP Address1

and in CNAME section

cba abc.mycompany.com ( Here full fqdn not required for CNAME )

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@Smith883

ANAME (aka ALIAS) isn't a real record type, it's more like a template/macro that expands to A & AAAA records copied from the target domain, refreshed every hour or so.

Shopify want you to use ANAME or CNAME because they want to remain able to change their web servers' IP addresses without breaking the customers' domains. (With ANAME, they can just switch the address in their own DNS and take down the old ones after a few days. But if some customers have entered A & AAAA records directly, it could take weeks for them to notice.)

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