DNS Record Types Explained: A Beginner’s Guide to AAAA, CNAME, MX & NS

Do you ever know how the Browser reach to our websites? and how it works at the backend?
Let’s see if I search the “nikhilmali.com“ on browser I get the website page.
but to get anything on the internet we want the IP address to reach,
and I do not provide the IP address to the browser, and I still get to the server by only providing the particular name.

So, Here DNS (Domain Name System) comes in picture. where the IP are being mapped to the particular name in our case “nikhilmali.com“ to reach website. These records help browser to get to the IP of the particular website, and these names are also easy to remember. In this blog we see about the DNS Records and its Types.

What is DNS (Domain Name System)?

DNS is the phonebook of internet. we can relate it like contact in our phone where we are not able to remember many numbers whether we can remember by the name of the particular contact

example:

Mom —> 9083884832

were the Mom is the domain name like “nikhilmali.com“ and the number is the IP of the domain.

Why we need DNS Records?

DNS have the lot of information about the website like:

IP
different pointed domain name
Email delivery rules
Verifications

So above things make website reliable, trackable and secure we need these qualities. For all of this we have the different types of the DNS records

Types Of DNS Records

NS (Name Server)
name server is just the DNS manager for the particular domain
```
  nikhilmali.com --> ns1.cloudflare.com
  nikhilmali.com --> ns2.cloudflare.com
```
this means the Cloudflare manages the DNS of the “nikhilmali.com“
A (Domain → IP)
this record is direct point to the IPv4 of the server

we can say it is the final record before the IP
```
  nikhilmali.com --> 192.33.34.2
```
AAAA
This is the pointing to the IPv6 of of the server which is containing the hexa decimal values also
```
  nikhilmali.com --> 2345:0425:2CA1:0000:0000:0567:5673:23b5.
```
CNAME (1 Domain —>2 Domain)
In the CNAME one Domain is pointing to another Domain
```
  nikhlmali-blog.com --> nikhilmali.com
```
MX (how mail find your mail server)
MX record handles the mails for the particular domain
```
  nikhilmali.com --> mail.nikhilmali.com
```
TXT (extra info and verification)

It is for the verification, ownership and trust of the domain
```
  v=spf1 include:_spf.nikhilmali.com ~all
```

conclusion

This article explores how browsers access websites through the Domain Name System (DNS), which maps domain names to IP addresses for easier recall and navigation. It discusses the importance of DNS records for website functionality, security, and reliability, and provides an overview of different DNS record types, including Name Server (NS), Address (A), IPv6 Address (AAAA), Canonical Name (CNAME), Mail Exchange (MX), and Text (TXT) records.