Advanced DNS Information

Welcome to the Freeola Internet customer support pages. This guide is designed to help understand some Advanced DNS terms. For more internet help topics please visit our main Support Page.

This is a basic guide to the terminologies used to control DNS and how to use this from your MyFreeola account when you buy domain names from GetDotted. If you are using Freeola hosted email addresses and websites, you do not need to know or understand this guide, as we will set up and control DNS on your behalf.

There are many parts to a DNS record, but the primary ones are the A Records, CNAME and the MX records.

The A record simply controls which IP address a web browser will go to when a particular URL is entered. For example when you type freeola.com into your web browser, the DNS server will tell the web browser that it needs to connect to the IP address 62.249.232.160, to get its data.

A CNAME record is similar, but with a CNAME record you provide a hostname instead of an A Record to direct your domain elsewhere. For example, if we wanted the hostname noc.freeola.com to use the same IP address as the hostname freeola.com we could set noc.freeola.com as having the CNAME entry freeola.com.

The advantage of this over an A record is that if you change the IP address of the server that is hosting a CNAME, you do not need to update anything other than the A record of the hostname that is changing.

You also have the option to change your MX records, this allows you to control how your email is delivered. If you run or have access to your own email server you can specify that all mail for your domain is delivered to a IP address (or pair of IP addresses). This means that you can, for example, set up a Microsoft Exchange server and run your own email or point to an e-mail supplier that provides bulk e-mail services.

You can change any Advanced DNS Records from within your MyFreeola account. A guide on altering these can be found by visiting our Setting Custom DNS Records help page.