this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026

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Help making sense of IPs and A records (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Maroon@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am trying to host my first website + service.

#My server setup

I have a static webpage in server 1. A gotosocial installation in server 2. They are connected to a reverse proxy (server 3). This has a public IP of (not exact) 204.230.30.104.

#My router setup

I can open ports 80 and 443. I just don't know to which IP (I'll explain why down).

#My registrar

In have a domain, say 'newexample.com'. The @ has an A record for the IP (not exact) 208.145.80.33

#My confusion

If I want to make a subdomin for GoToSocial like 'gts.social.new example.com', do I use CNAME or A record?
If I want to serve the static website to be served at 'www.newexample.com' , do I remake an A record for www.newexample.com ?
There appears to be a CNAME in my DNS record already by the registrar for www that goes to some "redirect" link. What's up with that?
How do I make the domain connect to my server and how to make the server connect to my domain properly?

all 11 comments

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[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 21 points 4 months ago (1 children)

KISS

Delete all the registrar's crap

Add A record for the subdomains you want, like www or root (@) or socialwhatever to point to your reverse proxy's public IP

Done, reverse proxy proxies the request based on the requested URL

[+] Maroon@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

When port forwarding, you want that internal IP to be the internal address of the server on your LAN. That way, all port 443 traffic sent to your external ipv4 (as received by your router) is sent to whatever machine is hosting the web server or reverse proxy.

Regarding the www sub domain cname, idk what your registrar is doing but it's common practice to redirected www to your base domain, or vise versa; so web visitors get a consistent experience whether they type www or not. It would probably be best to start fresh though

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

(You are really underestimating the second S of KISS in my case, sorry!)

LOL That got a physical chuckle as I can most definitely relate.

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 points 4 months ago

I'll need to know a little more about your setup. Sending DM...

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

An A record maps to an IP address. A CNAME record maps to another URL. Since you are trying to map to an IP address rather than a URL, you will want an A record.

If all of your sites will be served from the same proxy server at 204.230.30.104, you can create a single, wildcard A record for *.newexample.com. This will point every subdomain to your proxy's IP address. You don't need to create an A record for each subdomain.

If you are planning on serving some subdomains from 204.230.30.104 and other subdomains from another proxy at 69.4.20.187, you would need multiple A records for pointing the subdomains toward their respective proxies.

If you wanted to serve from proxy running on a dynamic IP address, and you're using a DDNS provider to point newexample.ddns.net back to your current IP address, you could use a CNAME record to point newexample.com to newexample.ddns.net.

[+] Maroon@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 points 4 months ago

Your 142.x.x.x will be your public IP address. All devices on your network share that public IP. They all have a unique private IP address too, accessible only on your network. It probably starts with 192.168.x.x, but it could be 10.x.x.x or even less likely 172.16–31.x.x.

If you want to operate a web server that users can go to by typing https://youdomain.com/, you'll need to forward from ports 80 and 443 through to the internal IP address of your server, using the "port forwarding" settings on your router. What port on the internal IP you route to depends on how your server is configured. But a basic default configuration is fairly likely to be 80 and 443, too.

Since you have a reverse proxy, all traffic from your router should go to that. Then you use that to send the appropriate traffic to the appropriate server based on whatever rules you want to apply. (e.g. siteone.mydomain.com goes to server 1, sitetwo.mydomain.com goes to server 2, or mydomain.com/siteone goes to server 1, etc.).

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 points 4 months ago

It depends on how you want to do it; how your reverse proxy server is setup. I use Pangolin running on a VPS as my proxy server. It uses a tunnel ("Newt") between web servers running on my home network and the VPS, so I don't need any open/forwarded ports on my home router.

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If you have a static IP address, you can just use A records for each subdomain you want to use and not really worry about it.

If you do not have a static IP address, you may want to use one single A record, usually your base domain (example.com), then CNAME records for each of your subdomains.

A CNAME record is used to point one name at another name, in this case your base domain. This way, when your IP address changes, you only have to change the one A record and all the CNAME records will point at that new IP as well.

Example:

A example.com 1.2.3.4

CNAME sub1.example.com example.com

CNAME sub2.example.com example.com

You'd then use a tool like ACME.sh to automatically update that single A record when your IP changes.

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP	Internet Protocol
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
nginx	Popular HTTP server

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