5. How does the DNS system work? (Setting up custom domains)

If you would like to understand a bit better how the DNS system works and what exactly it is that we are asking you to configure, you've found the right place!

DNS record types used by Glopal

In general, Glopal will only ever ask you to modify one of 4 types of DNS records: A, AAAA, TXT and CNAME. That is all we need to authorize and redirect your chosen domain/subdomains to the localized versions of your store.

There are many other DNS records types (e.g. MX for routing email traffic, NS to configure which nameservers are authoritative for your DNS zone, etc.). We do not interact with all of these records and we will never ask you to modify or remove any of them.

What do these records mean?

A record (Address)

This is the basic type of record and it does the main job of translating the domain name (example.com) to an IP address (216.239.32.21). This lets the user's browser know which server it should contact to get the requested URL.

Example:

We will usually ask you to set four A records instead of just one. This is done for redundancy purposes (in case one of them is down).

The @ symbol is simply a placeholder that translates to "current domain at root level" ("bare" form, so without "www" or any other subdomains.)

TTL (Time To Live) is a configuration setting that tells other DNS servers for how long they should cache this value. It is recommended to set it to 1 hour (3600 seconds). Do not set it to a larger value - if you make a mistake it will be hard to get the corrected value propagated in the DNS system.

AAAA record (Address IPv6)

This is almost exactly the same as A record, but using the more recent IPv6 (so instead of IPv4 216.239.32.21 we have IPv6 2001:4860:4802:32::15).

Example:

In this case we are also using four records for redundancy.

CNAME record (Canonical Name)

The CNAME is just an alias - it points a subdomain to another domain.

Example:

If you add such a record to your example.com domain DNS zone, value de in the Host field will be expanded to de.example.com and an alias will be set for this URL. 

As CNAME entries are aliases, it's not allowed to provide a direct IP address, like in A or AAAArecords.

Another example:

In ths example a wildcard * is used. This means ALL subdomains (*.example.com) will be redirected, unless explicitly configured otherwise (with another explicit CNAMErecord, like in the first example). Explicitly configured subdomains take precedence over a wildcard, so if you already have some subdomains configured (e.g. www which is a regular subdomain!), it will continue to work even if you add a wildcard record to redirect all the other subdomains. The wildcard simply works as a fallback in this case.

In rare cases the DNS provider may not support wildcard records, which means all of the subdomains have to be individually configured.

Usually, there cannot be duplicated CNAME entries for the same subdomain (e.g. you cannot have 2 CNAME records for de.example.com). If a subdomain is already aliased, you need to change it if you wants to point the subdomain to Glopal localized version of your store.

TXT record

These are just arbitrary text records used to provide any type of information to 3rd parties. We are using it to prove to Google control of the domain for hosting international sites and running Google Shopping campaigns.

Example: 

This record should always be added at the domain's root level (identified by @ sign).

We will generate the relevant TXT records for you. Please note that they are unique for each top-level domain.