Glossary Entry
What is CNAME Record?
CNAME Record without the jargon — the definition, the analogy, and why any site owner should care.
The short answer
A CNAME makes one hostname an alias of another, so the name arrives wherever its target currently points.
The rest of the page opens it up — the mechanics, why a site owner should care, and one concrete example of it at work.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
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People, if you get stuck
Indirection is the entire point: www aliases example.com, and shop.example.com aliases yourstore.platform.com. Move the target's addresses and every alias follows unprompted, which is precisely why SaaS platforms hand you a hostname to aim at instead of a number.
There are rules. A CNAME cannot sit beside any other record on the same name, which is why a bare domain traditionally cannot carry one. A number of DNS providers get round it with flattening, which they label ALIAS or ANAME.
The everyday parallel
It is a standing instruction in the routing system, saying that whatever arrives here should be treated as though it arrived there. The target may relocate as often as it likes and nobody upstream ever needs telling.
Carry that picture with you and most documentation on the topic loses its mystery on a first read.
What genuinely rides on it
Site builders, mail platforms and verification flows all hook up through CNAMEs. Once aliasing makes sense as an idea, their setup instructions stop reading like an incantation and start reading like plumbing.
That, incidentally, is the bar for any technical term — not 'could I lecture on it' but 'would I recognise it as the answer to my problem'. For this one, you now would.
CNAME Record out in the open
A newsletter tool's custom domain runs on a CNAME: news.example.com aliases their ingest hostname, and their engineers rotate the addresses underneath for years while the customer never opens DNS again.
Entirely unremarkable once you have seen it — which is the point: most hosting ideas are plain machinery behind an intimidating label.
Where it sits inside your own account
You will meet it in the control panel and now and then in a support thread, usually already set correctly. If this one landed, the natural follow-ups are A Record, DNS, Subdomain and TXT Record.
The rate you register at is the rate you renew at, so year two costs precisely what year one did — nothing lying in wait on the invoice.
Why a hundred definitions were worth the writing
Sooner or later every confusing hosting term turns into a support ticket, so we defined the hundred commonest ones properly — once, in the same plain English we use with customers.
Order an annual plan and the first year of the name's registration is on us.
- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
The next step, drawn out
Carry on into A Record and DNS — ideas rarely travel alone, so the neighbours are linked in.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
This term, properly landed
CNAME Record defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Open the control panel and find where this idea sits — a definition turns into understanding the moment it attaches to your own site.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
The platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and your setup becomes something you know instead of hope.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — A Record, DNS and Subdomain finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- A renewal figure identical to the one you registered at
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- Softaculous included for one-click application installs
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- A daily copy, with restores you run yourself from the panel
- PHP versions set per site from the control panel
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Why can a bare domain not have a CNAME?
Other records have to live at the apex — SOA, NS and usually MX — and the standards forbid a CNAME from sharing a name with any of them. Either your provider supports flattening, or you put an A record at the apex and keep the CNAMEs on the subdomains.
The CNAME is in place and the service still rejects it. Why?
Nine times in ten it is a mistyped target, a trailing dot left off, the record attached to the wrong name, or a panel that quietly glued your domain onto whatever you typed. Query the name directly and you get the same answer every other resolver on earth is getting.
How do payments and auto-renewal work?
You pay by credit or debit card through a secure checkout, and renewals bill at the same rate as the original order. Every invoice sits in your client area, and auto-renewal switches off with a toggle in the account — no telephone call needed.
What happens when I outgrow the plan?
You upgrade in place. Plan changes are made from the client area with no migration and no downtime, and the range runs from small shared accounts through VPS to full dedicated machines. Growth becomes a setting on the account rather than a search for a new host.
Keep reading
TXT Record
A TXT record stores arbitrary text inside your DNS zone, and that is the machinery underneath domain verifi…
Subdomain
A subdomain is a named branch of your domain — blog.example.com, shop.example.com — and each can hold its o…
How to Create an SPF Record
Step by step, with every snag flagged before you get to it.
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