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Help Docs Liquid Web Portal Domains and DNS DNS Management Using ALIAS DNS Record Types

Using ALIAS DNS Record Types

An `ALIAS` record, unlike an `A` record, can help protect your site from DDoS attacks. Learn how to create one in your Liquid Web account.
3 min read

The Domain Name System (or DNS) has been around almost as long as the Internet and is the system that allows us to use easy to remember names, like google.com, rather than complex strings of numbers, like 172.217.4.110, to find a website. While the system has been in place for a long time and generally works very reliably, there are some circumstances where the system can be abused to hurt specific servers or businesses.

For instance, if a malicious user wants to target a server or website with a DDoS Attack, they can flood a specific IP address with bad data, forcing the server to process all of the bad requests. This flood of bad requests can eventually prevent a server from processing legitimate requests and the site or server will appear to be “down” to the rest of the world.

One way to stop a DDOS attack in progress is to change the IP address of the targeted server or website. If there is only one site using the affected IP address, this is a rather simple process of changing a single DNS record. However, in today’s world of web-hosting, single IP addresses can often host hundreds of sites, making this type of attack mitigation extremely difficult, if not impossible.

A new method of managing DNS Records has made this type of defense possible again. Typically, main domain names (or apex domains, like example.com) are assigned an A record, pointing the domain to a primary IP address. However, we can now use an ALIAS record to point an apex domain to another domain or hostname, like myapp.hosting.com. ALIAS records function much like CNAME records, but are used for apex domains, rather than for sub-domains. If all of the domains on myapp.hosting.com use ALIAS records, we can change one A record (that of myapp.hosting.com) to protect all of those apex domains as they will now resolve to the new IP address assigned to myapp.hosting.com.

The process for creating an ALIAS record is basically the same as creating any other DNS record. If your DNS is hosted with Liquid Web, you can follow the directions below.

NOTE:

If your DNS is hosted outside of Liquid Web, you will need to verify that the DNS host supports flattened CNAME/ALIAS records. If your DNS host supports these record types, you should be able to create an ALIAS record in a similar manner to creating a CNAME record. If you don’t know where your DNS is hosted, see our article Where Is My DNS Hosted?
  1. Log into your Liquid Web Account.
  2. Click on DNS on the left side of the screen.
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  3. Click the domain name for which you are adding the ALIAS Record to expand the list.
  4. Click Add Record at the right of the DNS records list.
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  5. A blank new record will appear at the bottom of the list. Select ALIAS in the Type drop-down menu. Type in the ALIAS hostname in the data field and then click the check box to save the record.
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  6. Once the record is saved, it will show in the DNS Zone list. Your website is now pointing to the correct destination and is live for viewing.
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