up vote 1 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I am hosting a site off of Amazon S3 and hence can't point the root record, ie: domain.com to an Alias. The www.domain.com points to the S3 endpoint.

Do I have to have a root record and does it have to be an A record?

link|improve this question
70% accept rate
feedback

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Root records in DNS are the central DNS servers the world relies on to coordinate resolution. This has nothing to do with your server or DNS records.

I think what you're looking for is a Default Record, so that when people go to http://domain.com it brings up your site. Yes, Default Records have to be of type A (or AAAA for IPv6 addresses) in most DNS servers.

link|improve this answer
Ok thanks for clearing that up. Is it mandatory to have a default record? – Hilt86 Apr 22 '11 at 13:57
1  
It's not common, but no, it's not mandatory. – zippy Apr 22 '11 at 16:46
Is it possible to have multiple default records pointing to different IP addresses? Google apps allows you to forward domain.com to www.domain.com and therefore need to point domain.com to a list of IPs they give you. – Hilt86 May 7 '11 at 1:39
@Hilt86, yep, default records are just A records with the same name as the parent domain, and you can have multiple A records with the same name. This is of course dependent on the implementation, which will usually support this, but isn't required to (IIRC). – Chris S♦ May 7 '11 at 2:24
1  
Thanks :) I really need to read the DNS & BIND book by O'Reilly – Hilt86 May 8 '11 at 8:19
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

There is a restriction that CNAMEs, which are the aliases, are only allowed to be by themselves and thus aren't allowed as a top-level domain record (because there is also an SOA record there). So, no you can't have an alias. But functionally a web browser will treat a CNAME and an A name the same way so it wouldn't help you in the end.

Your problem is that you need a web server to be running and acting as domain.com and then redirecting you to www.domain.com. That's actually what I'd suggest and what many sites do: The server that serves up this redirect doesn't need to be nearly as beefy as the www one.

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.