Glossary

There is a lot of technical jargon involved with properly setting up your domain properly: here is a short glossary to help explain what each term means.
DNS
Domain Name System. This is how a computer figures out how the numeric address of a specific server when given a name.
CNAME
Canonical Name - when a computer has multiple names, this points to the real name. In some cases, it can be daisy-chained, so it points to another CNAME that then points to the real name. It is often used to make human-friendly names.
A
Address an IPv4 address record. This DNS entry maps from a name to an IPv4 address.
AAAA
Address an IPv6 address record. This DNS entry maps from a name to an IPv6 address.
ALIAS/ANAME
This is a unofficial term for a combination of a CNAME with a A record. For technical reasons, you cannot put a CNAME on a root/naked hostname. Since CNAMEs are often necessary, some DNS providers support a workaround that let's you create a CNAME-like entry that resolves like an A/AAAA record.
TXT
Text - DNS entries with random bits of text that have lots of different uses. Redirect2me can you them so you don't have to login to the admin interface to setup your redirections.
MX
Mail Exchange the DNS records used by email systems to route email.
TTL
Time To Live - part of a DNS record that specifies how long the record can be cached. Entered in seconds. Note that it is not always obeyed, especially if it is very short.
Naked
Another term for the root hostname of a domain.
TLD
Top Level Domain - the last part of a domain name. Originally com, edu, net and org, but now expanded to thousands of possibilities.
ccTLD
Country Code Top Level Domain - the last part of a domain name that is a two-level ISO-LATER country code.
dig
A command-line tool to lookup DNS entries.
curl
A command-line tool to fetch a web page. With the proper parameters, you can see exactly which redirections are happening.
Certificate
Part of the keys to SSL encryption. A certificate contains the name(s) of the web servers where it is valid. If you use the wrong certificate, you will get a "Certificate Mismatch Error".
SSL
Secure Sockets Layer - the encryption system used by HTTPS (and others) to protect your communications
HTTP
Hypertext Transport Protocol - the protocal used between a web browser and a web server.
HTTPS
HTTP Secure - the encrypted version of HTTP.
NSLookup
A command-line tool to lookup DNS entries.
NS
Name Server the DNS entries that control which server is responsible for your domain.
Public suffix
This is the part of a domain name that you do not own. Usually, this is the TLD, like .com or .org, but some TLDs and services have multiple parts, like .co.uk.
registrar
A company that sells domanin names on behalf of a registry.
registry
The company or organization that owns a top-level domain (TLD). This is generally not the same as who is selling you a domain name.
Root
The domain without any additional prefixed names. So, example.com is a root hostname, www.example.com is not.

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