DNS Records Explained for People Who Ship Websites
A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT and the TTL decisions that decide whether your migration is invisible or a two-hour outage.
Paj Digital Labs 1 min read
Records you will actually touch
- A / AAAA — hostname to IP.
- CNAME — hostname to another hostname. Never on the zone apex.
- MX — mail routing, with priority values.
- TXT — SPF, DKIM, DMARC and domain verification.
TTL is a migration tool
Drop TTL to 300 seconds a day before a cutover, migrate, verify, then raise it back. Skipping this step is why "the site is still on the old server" tickets exist.
Verify from outside your network
bash
dig +short A example.com @1.1.1.1
dig +short TXT example.com @8.8.8.8Your local resolver lies to you. Always query a public resolver when confirming propagation.
Paj Digital Labs
The engineering journal of Paj Digital Solutions — hosting, server infrastructure and web engineering, written by the people who run the servers.
Related reading
Hardening a Fresh VPS: The 30-Minute Production Checklist
Every new VPS ships wide open. Here is the exact sequence we run at Paj Digital Solutions before a single site goes live — SSH keys, fail2ban, kernel tuning and firewall rules.
1 min read