Why does using a CNAME for a root domain work??

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
15/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Domain
networking

Research direction

Start by reading the issue body, its linked blog post, and the referenced screenshot to understand the root-domain CNAME setup. Done means providing a clear explanation of why this configuration works, including any relevant behavior by Hover or its DNS service; the issue names no repository files or tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I have a lot of domains and I have to move servers fairly frequently and it's a pain having to go back and change all the IP addresses for the roots when the server moves.

I wrote about this on my blog, and someone responded that you can use a CNAME instead of an IP address. I said this is wrong, it doesn't work that way, but I wish it did.

Then he said you can in fact use a CNAME, and it works. So I tried it, and damn it did work.

Here's a screen shot of how I've set up one domain at hover.com, the registrar I use for most of my stuff. No IP addresses.

So what's up with this? I'm happy, but curious...

PS: I've cc'd this via email to the people at Hover to see if they have a comment. Maybe they do something nice on their DNS server, and convert it to an IP address when someone accesses the root of the domain. That would be the sensible thing to do imho. But I'm no expert at DNS by any means. ;-)

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