WHAT IS A Cname? HOW DO I ADD IT TO MY DOMAIN DNS?
After you purchase your Custom Domain, and once you receive your
GoDaddy Registration Confirmation Email, from
Google Apps, you set-up your
Admin account. Then you will have access to the
Google Apps Control Panel.
There, you can monitor the status of your services, manage your user accounts and email lists, create web pages, and customize the interface and services to your organization's needs. Through the Control Panel, you can also view and edit all your
DNS Settings, update your
WHO IS information, and renew your Domain, before it expires. Among lots of other things, you use this Control Panel to add
Aname (host) and
Cname (
alias) records, to your Domain.
The
Domain Naming System is a very deep, complex subject, best left to the experts, but a simple analogy may be to say that it basically provides your Internet address. Your domain name is translated into an
Internet Protocol, or IP address, because computers understand numbers better than alphabetical letters, which we use to make our
URLs.
A
URL is constructed a certain way - in levels, like nearly everything else on a computer. After the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the component parts, concatenated by a 'dot' (.) after each part, in the case of my blog's URL, are:-
- The third-level, or Subdomain, domain - eg: www., or blogging.
- The second-level, or Root domain - eg:robertosblogs
- The first-level, or Top-level, domain name - eg:.net
... and your Domain is, in turn, hosted, either by
GoDaddy, or hundreds of other companies called
FTPs.
So, what is a
Cname, or Alias?
Without delving too deeply, a
Cname, also known as
Canonical name, is the properly denoted host name of a computer. A
Cname specifies an
alias, or
nickname, for a canonical
host name record - a computer, in a
Domain Naming System, (
DNS), record.
Its responsibility is to identify the location(s) of a site(s) on the internet - particularly on the Web.
Any computer can be the target of any number of
Cnames, but a separate
Cname record must be defined for the domain which sources each
alias. For each
Cname record, you provide an
alias (the source), and a
host (the target). For instance, in a URL such as
blogging.robertosblogs.net , the subdomain,
blogging., is written before the domain name root,
robertosblogs.net. Another
host could be
blogging. /
www.blogging. which I use for this blog. That's one of the best reasons to have a
Cname, because there could be many source Domains resolving to the one target.
Note: - Currently, if you publishing your Blogger blog to a non-root host in your Domain,
it is recommended that you record, what is sometimes called your
naked domain, as well as your
www. alias, so that you have a
symmetrical pair of hosts defined. Publish to the
www. alias, not the
naked alias.
The reason for this is that currently, re-direction is
asymmetrical. Hopefully, this will be a temporary situation!
To confuse you even more, in the following images, my subdomains, or aliases, point to
ghs.google.com. Why would I use
ghs.google.com as the
Points to Host Name, when the
add a Cname record (see:
step 9. image
below) wizard, suggests otherwise? Well, to try and keep it simple,
ghs.google.com is the central core/DNS array, so to speak, of a multi-tiered server system, with many filters. Most
ISPs around the world will cache copies of ghs.google.com for speed of return (
TTL)...
- One computer, called Son, talks to another computer, called Mum, and says; " What's Bob's address?" Mum says; "I don't know. Go ask your father, he'll know!" Well,
ghs.google.com is the father - but, on the way to ask his father, someone, maybe a sister, gives Son the address. So, there's less strain put on Dad and he doesn't get overworked (how it should be). He planned it that way, too, 'cause we Dad's are smart! It's called referral. To speed-up the process of finding out your address, your ISP will have a surrogate picture of the 'father', on hand, to ask for the address. That speeds everything up.
So what are the steps to add a
Cname record?
Step 1. Sign in to your
Google Apps account
Step 2. Select, and click on,
domain names.
Step 3. Select and click on
Advanced DNS Settings
Step 4. Take a note of your
Sign-in name (generally, a number), and
highlight and copy the Password. The reason for this is that it works better to do it that way.
Step 5. Using the information from the previous screen, Sign-in to the Domain Control Center
Step 6. Once in the Domain Manager, click on your
Domain Name link
Step 7. Click on
Total DNS Control (nothing else)
Step 8. This screen is where you can
add a Cname record, as indicated.
Don't change anything else!
Step 9. Add your (subdomain)
alias name, eg:
blogging. or
www.blogging. Also, you have to complete the
Points to Host Name section, and the
TTL (explained above).
(Back to
above text)
Step 10. Check your entries. If all OK - log-out.
Last, but not least, the
Aname record - what is it?
The
'A' record, or
Aname, points your Domain to an IP address. You would change this ONLY if you wanted to point your website to a different IP. You use an 'A' record to define the IP addresses of the 4 Google Apps DNS proxy servers, when you're defining the domain root, and pairing it with the
www. alias.
An
MX record is only for email, and is changed ONLY if you want to re-route your email.
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