There are several ways to point a domain name to an alternative domain or subdomain and one of them is by setting up a CNAME record. When you own a domain name and you have developed a site using some online service which supplies you with a service subdomain, you can easily link the two by setting up a CNAME record for your-domain.com that points to subdomain.provider.com. What you'll achieve with this is that www.your-domain.com is going to be in the browser address bar while it opens the already mentioned Internet site from the servers of the third-party company. It is very important to know that if you create a CNAME record, any other records your domain name may have will stop functioning, so you cannot have both a CNAME record pointing to one company and functioning email addresses with another. The CNAME record is always an alpha string, not a number, and often additional configuration may be needed with the other company.

CNAME Records in Shared Hosting

Setting up a CNAME record with our shared hosting plans is quite easy. Our in-house built Hepsia Control Panel has a section committed to the DNS records of your domains, so you can set up a new CNAME record for any domain or subdomain hosted inside your account in a couple of simple steps. There is also a video tutorial in the same section in which you can see the process first-hand. This feature provides you with various possibilities - if you set up a company site on our end, for instance, the staff can use their e-mails with the company domain name, not with the address of our mail server. If you decide to set up an Internet site using a different provider which offers online web design services, you can easily forward a domain hosted here and use it for the website. Last, but not least, in case you have an online store and you have a billing system for http://your-domain.com and/or an SSL certificate, you may create a CNAME record for the www subdomain and forward it to the main domain name, so all your customers are going to be forwarded to a secure URL.

CNAME Records in Semi-dedicated Servers

The Hepsia hosting CP, which comes with every one of our semi-dedicated server accounts, will allow you to set up a CNAME record without difficulty. When you want to create a private URL for your emails, to point a domain to a subdomain inside the account or to forward a domain to another provider and use some third-party service which they provide, it's not going to require more than three clicks to create such a record. All DNS records for the domain addresses and subdomains hosted within the semi-dedicated account will be listed in a separate section in the Control Panel, so when you are there, all you will have to do will be to choose the type of the record that you want to set up and the hostname for which you are creating it, and then input the actual record text. For your convenience, you can watch a short video in the Control Panel regarding how to set up a CNAME record or you can follow the instructions in the help article, which is available in the DNS records section.