DNS Record Explained

So What are DNS Record exactly , What are the types , what are each of their use cases Let’s understand step by step

DNS records are instruction that live on the authoritative server which is accessed to find diffrent ways in which a server requests are handled records could be the IP address to the server or to a load balancer leading to that IP address or anything which helps you connect to the server

There are various types of records but some of the important records among them are :

A record: This holds the IP address of the server in IPv4 format . 32-bit long string

AAAA record: This holds the IP address of the server in IPv6 format . 128-bit long string

CNAME record: Forward one domain to another domain e.g. www.example.com —> example.com

does not points to any IP

MX record: This are mail records and can be created for literally any domain that you bought, Format is simple: @ here @ represents that this is a MX record

NS record: This record holds the direction to the authoritative server which keeps the rest rest of the records.

Let’s understand them one by one

A record and AAAA record:

This record hold the actual IP address of the requested domain name and this is where the server lives this records are what actually stored in the Name server or Authoritative server. The only diffrence is that A record contains IPv4 address 32-bit long so limited avaliability and AAAA-record contains 128-bit long address which are of IPv6 address and are highly avaliable with wider range.

CNAME record(Cannonical Name):

This record stores another domains or subdomain names not IP address like if you want to have a separate service to run under the same domain name you can create a subdomain and point it to the domain name but with diffrent services e.g. blog.example.com —> example.com but since the domain has a subdomain it is redirected to the blog services of example.com

MX Record:

This record is mail service for a domain , it can be created with any domain name the server has access to it . if a MX record is created any one can mail; using that [e-mail]

e.g. [e-mail] can work as a mail if the MX is created on this name

All the server has to to is create a MX record for this username and the @ here represents that the domain is used as a MX record.

NS record:

This is Name Server record and as the name suggests it keeps the name and IP address of the server it is the authoritative server which holds records of a server information , They generally have 2 records Primary and secondary . Secondary is used when primary goes down is slow.

And these are some of the important records that you need to know

This is my understanding of the records happy to get feedbacks

If you like this hope you will like this : DNS Resolution(Why name instead of IPs?)