DNS AName Record Question

#1

Hi all,

I think this question may be a little off topic but I’m hoping to leverage some group smarts.

I have a domain name (peopleinside.co.uk) which I use for my business.

I host the website on heroku and that’s fine. I have set up a CName for ‘www.peopleinside.co.uk’. However, heroku won’t give me an IP Address and my DNS hosting provider will only allow me to use an ip address for an AName record (which I want to use for ‘peopleinside.co.uk’).

I’m a bit clueless about DNS so I’m hoping I’ve missed something blindingly obvious or there is some fiendish way around this problem.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome!

Glenn

#2

May be I misunderstood, but this looks normal to me.
DNS records: CName = name to name, AName = name to ip (only)
What you probably need is 301 permanent redirect on ports 80/443 from domain.co.uk to www.domain.co.uk
Or make domain.co.uk and www.domain.co.uk same ip (using aname and cname) and use subdomains like mail.domain.co.uk for business

I should probably add that www is a subdomain which means you cannot link an ip to it without your own dns resolver

#4

I’m unfamiliar with Heroku.

Have you followed their documentation though?

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains

Pointing www.peopleinside.co.uk at people inside.co.uk can be done with a CNAME or an additional A record.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19566856/domain-ip-address-for-www-and-non-www-for-canonical-url

Note that both those options would make www and non-www appear in clients address bars, if you want consistency (you probably should, but it’s usually fairly minor) you should also setup a redirect. You can usually set it up fairly easily in whatever server (apache/nginx) you’re using.

#5

Why are you trying to set up an A record for peopleinside.co.uk ?
If you want the main domain to point to the same website as the www subdomain, why can’t you use a CNAME record ?

#6

A record = ipv4 address record
AAAA record= ipv6 address record
CName = record that you point to another record

Why just use a CName not an A

But is this what you want or do you want your apex record to redirect to your www

#7

Hi @Glennbo,

The IP address of the site is obfuscated by the provider, there are also a few issues with the setup.

https://mxtoolbox.com/emailhealth/Peopleinside.co.uk/

Happy to help you out, but this setup looks to be beyond the classical setup and likely uses an intermediary like Akamai or similar.

Feel free to dm me and I can walk you through it if you’ve not figured it out already.

#8

Duncan @chris_slms @PReardon

I host with UK2.net and they won’t allow me to use a CName record to point to the base domain name. This seems to be a recent change. Maybe the answer is to change domain name hosts.

@MissedaMaker thanks for the link to that tool.

@MissedaMaker and @duncank I’m going to read both your emails again tomorrow when I’m a liitke fresher. :blush:

Thanks all for the replies so far.

#9

A few places don’t let you use CNames for your Apex (root) record

1 Like
#10

Hi

I just wanted to say a huge thank-you to everyone in this thread. I ended up learning more that I thought was possible about DNS including DMARC and I now have my email set up properly.

Thanks for the mxtool @MissedaMaker

Take care,

Glenn

2 Likes
#11

Btw, I ended up moving to a new DNS hosting service in the end.