ANAME records
Our Primary DNS service supports ANAME psuedo-records. ANAME records (sometimes called ALIAS records) are very similar to CNAME records, but can be used it places where a CNAME record cannot.
When creating a DNS record, it is often desirable to make the target of the record another hostname, rather than using IP addresses directly. For example, if your website is www.example.com and you host it on a server called yali.mythic-beasts.com, then you can create a CNAME record that makes www.example.com an alias for yali.mythic-beasts.com rather than adding the IP addresses of the server to your DNS zone directly. This means that if the IP address of the server ever changes, no changes are needed to your DNS zone.
CNAME limitations
Unfortunately, CNAME records can't always be used. For example, if you wanted your website to be on example.com (rather than, or as well as, www.example.com), then you would not be able to use a CNAME record. This is because you will need to have a number of other records for example.com; you will need to have MX records to specify the mail server for your domain, NS records to identify the nameservers, and probably a collection of other records too, and a CNAME record can't co-exist with any other record types.
This is a limitation of the DNS system, and is because CNAME records make one host name an alias for all purposes.
ANAME records
ANAME records solve this by allowing you to specify another hostname as the target, and our DNS system will automatically lookup that hostname, create A and AAAA records for you.
In other words, an ANAME record makes one hostname an alias for another for A and AAAA record lookups (which are the ones used to find the IP address of a website), but does not interfere with any other record types.
ANAME record refresh time
As noted above, ANAME records are not real records, and are automatically converted into A and AAAA records by our DNS system. This is conversion is done by a process that runs once every five minutes and checks the IP addresses of the target of the ANAME record. This means that you will see a delay of up to five minutes before our nameservers reflect changes made to ANAME records.