Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that so many of the comments in this thread are about dns hosting services and not dns server software support for these so-called "alias records".

I was making a list of "why on Earth doesn't this simple software exist?" items the other day and "simple server-side CNAME support" was on the list. Does any common DNS server package provide this support easily out of the box? It seems like one of the most common uses cases possible.

View on HN

Small warning: CNAME at apex is commonly used for pointing traffic to a CDN or load balancing kind of service. These services tend to use DNS for part of their traffic orchestration (e.g. different DNS response based on user region) which gets less than optimal or even plain wrong results if your DNS server software resolves the CNAME instead of the end-user.

If they weren't using DNS as part of their strategy they could've given you a simple IP instead of a CNAME, saving your clients some lookup time.

A lot of DNS providers provide "ANAME" records. Which are essentially services which do the lookup and update A records in a cron.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com