Creating a CNAME record for each of the domain addresses or subdomains that you have within a hosting account will permit you to forward it to a different domain/subdomain. The forwarded domain name will lose all of its records - A, MX and so forth, and will take the records of the domain name it is being directed to. In this light, you cannot create a CNAME record to forward your domain to a third-party provider and keep a working email service with the first hosting company. It is also essential to know that a CNAME record is always a string of words rather than a number as it's often mistaken for the A record of the domain name being redirected. One of the primary uses of a CNAME record is to direct a domain that you own through one company to the servers of some other company assuming you have created an Internet site with the latter. That way, the website will appear under your own domain name, not under some subdomain provided by the third-party provider.
CNAME Records in Hosting
Creating a CNAME record through our hosting is extremely easy. Our in-house built Hepsia Control Panel includes a section dedicated to the DNS records of your domains, so you can create a new CNAME record for any domain or subdomain hosted in your account in only a few simple steps. You can find a video tutorial inside the same section in which you can see the process first-hand. This feature gives you many possibilities - if you create a company website on our end, for example, the employees can use their e-mails with the company domain name, not with the address of our mail server. If you want to set up an Internet site by using a different provider that offers online web design services, you can easily forward a domain address hosted here and use it for the website. Last, but not least, if you have a web-based store and you have a billing system for http://your-domain.com and/or an SSL certificate, you could set up a CNAME record for the www subdomain and point it to the main domain address, so all your customers will be forwarded to a secure URL.
CNAME Records in Semi-dedicated Servers
Managing DNS records usually seems a challenging task to people with less experience, but the Hepsia hosting CP, which comes with each and every semi-dedicated server which we provide, is very easy to use. If you need to set up a CNAME record for any purpose, all you will have to do will be to choose the domain name or subdomain you need, select the type of record, that will be CNAME in this case, then input the value i.e. the domain address or subdomain you are forwarding to. The procedure is very easy and you can create the record in the DNS Records section of the Control Panel. Within the hour the new record will be fully active and within a few hours it is going to propagate worldwide. If you are not sure what you have to do, we've prepared a comprehensive help article and a short video tutorial concerning how to go about creating a CNAME record and they are both located within that very same section of Hepsia. Of course, you can also get in touch with us for help at any time.