DNS Records

This is a high-level overview of the different types of supported DNS records.

Additionally, DNSimple has excellent documentation on DNS records & more: https://support.dnsimple.com/categories/dns/

Basics

A: The most basic record. Points your domain at an IPv4 address.
AAAA: The A record’s sibling: it points at an IPv6 address. Adding one is strongly encouraged if your hosting provider supports IPv6. (And if they don’t, ask them to!)
CNAME: Short for “canonical name”, it tells whatever’s looking up your domain “look at this domain instead”. You’ll frequently see hosting providers tell you to use it.
ALIAS (Unique to our current nameserver provider): Similar to a CNAME, but it’s never sent to your client. The nameservers resolve it in the backend and return an A and/or AAAA record.
MX: Short for “mail exchange”, it tells servers sending you email where your email servers are.
URL (Unique to our current nameserver provider): Sends an HTTP redirect to the URL you specify. Behind the scenes, it publishes A records pointing to a redirector server.
TXT: Contains human-readable data about your domain. Typically, you’ll see this used when other services want to verify you control a domain, or for implementing email authentication standards such as DMARC and SPF.

SRV: Defines the location of a server of a given protocol, like a more general MX record. Usage depends on the protocol in question.
SSHFP: Contains the SSH key fingerprint for the server on the corresponding domain.

CAA: Specifies who can issue TLS (i.e. HTTPS) certificates for the domain.
PTR: Pointer to a common name. Unlike a CNAME record, resolvers don’t continue to search when they see a PTR record.
NS: Delegates a domain to a different nameserver.
SPF: Deprecated form of storing data for the SPF email security standard.
HINFO: Structured form of showing data about the server behind a site.
NAPTR: Maps from a resource name to a unique identifier. Often used as part of the SIP telephony protocol.