ANAME record
DNS Made Easy's branded version of ALIAS / CNAME flattening. Same purpose: CNAME-like behavior at the apex, returning A records to resolvers.
ANAME is what DNS Made Easy and a few smaller providers call their ALIAS record. Same purpose, different name. It exists to solve the "apex can't have a CNAME" problem.
ALIAS vs ANAME
Functionally they're the same. The split is mostly historical branding: DNSimple coined "ALIAS" early, DNS Made Easy went with "ANAME" later, and most other providers picked one of the two.
In day-to-day SaaS docs you can treat them as synonyms. If your help center says "add an ALIAS or ANAME record at your apex pointing to edge.yourapp.com," customers know what to do.
How resolution works
When a recursive resolver asks the authoritative DNS server for an A record on example.com:
- Authoritative server sees the ANAME entry pointing at
edge.yourapp.com. - It resolves
edge.yourapp.comitself, often using a cached lookup. - It returns those A records as the answer to
example.com. - The TTL on the returned A records is usually the shorter of the two TTLs in the chain.
The resolver and end-user never see an ANAME. From their perspective, example.com just has A records.
Catch: provider switching
ANAME records don't survive a DNS provider migration. If you move from DNS Made Easy to Cloudflare, the ANAME entries don't import; you have to rebuild them as Cloudflare's flattened CNAMEs.