[reres]

Thanks for the quick reply, but I seem to have found the problem.

I was testing this on IE 8, and it would always fail and go to Bing stating it couldn't find company.com

I then used a fresh session of Firefox, typed company.com, and it works. I also went to a VM system and verified the problem exists there, FF is ok, IE is not.

Strange. Oh well, I guess we will have to live with it as is.

Appreciate you response and help.

[mopedmaniac]

If you are using 000webhost for mail and ftp as well... your DNS would like this (just to prevent you from running into problems later..)

company.com > A record > 31.170.168.86
www > CNAME > company.com
ftp > CNAME > company.com
mail > CNAME > company.com

[Mate]

Originally Posted by mopedmaniac

company.com > A record > 31.170.168.86
www > CNAME > company.com
ftp > CNAME > company.com
mail > CNAME > company.com

If the DNS provider calls for FQDN (fully qualified domain name) entries as CNAME data, the CNAME data entry should be terminated with a period: company.com.

company.com > A record > 31.170.168.86
www > CNAME > company.com.
ftp > CNAME > company.com.
mail > CNAME > company.com.

[reres]

Thanks gents for the help. Still having the problem with just company.com but the www.company.com is going to the 000webhost.com website as we intended.

We currently use MS Office 365 for email which is just stellar, the Sharepoint not so stellar. Currently our DNS is pretty basic and as follows:

A company 31.170.160.86 1 Hour
CNAME www company.com 1 Hour

In the A record, I am not allowed to make company.com just company, so I suspect that is the problem, but what is weird about that is the WWW is pointing to company.com and that works. Bizarre.

So we are not in any critical stage anymore thanks to Mopedmaniacs (And others') help! Just this little annoyance which seems to be more with the MS Office 365 DNS manager than anything else at this stage.

[Mate]

@ reres:

If you were able to tell us the actual domain name, it would probably only take minutes to determine what the problem might be.

It's your call.

[reres]

Just an update. I was able to reference another website of a friends and just mimicked their settings with mine.

Heres what I did:


Created an A Record
Host Name: @
Points To: 31.170.160.86

Created a CName record
Host name: WWW
Points to: company.com

This solved the WWW and the company.com issue.

So looks like I wasn't aware (and am still not aware) of what the @ sign does in DNS?

[Mate]

Originally Posted by reres

So looks like I wasn't aware (and am still not aware) of what the @ sign does in DNS?

@ corresponds to the $ORIGIN record in DNS data where it represents the FQDN (fully qualified domain name).

Many domain registrars assume that the domains they 'sell' will only over be addressed using example.com and www.example.com so they simply offer the ability to enter records @ and www respectively.

@ is never used in email data within DNS records.
There is an email component to the SOA (start of authority) record, but the email address @ is always replaced with a period.

You don't need to use the dummy domain name company.com as IANA have specifically reserved the domain name example.com for illustrative purposes.