What's the difference between my nameserver and CNAME settings?

Question

I have purchased a domain name(mxsoup.net) through GoDaddy, and it is just parked. In order to set up my custom URL for my SourceAudio site, they give me the following instructions:

In order to host your site at a your own URL, we need you to set up some DNS records to point your URL to us. Specifically, we need two CNAME references, one for 'www.mxsoup.net' and one for 'secure.mxsoup.net', both of which should point to 'web2.sourceaudio.com'.

But the rep on the phone at GoDaddy said that my site is hosted at HostMonster.com, and therefore I need to talk to them to accomplish this (which is possibly true, but my business owner says he hasn't purchased hosting for this particular domain, yet he does have some other sites in his HostMonster hosting acct.)

My GoDaddy account shows that my nameservers are pointing at NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM, and NS2.HOSTMONSTER.COM, and I can edit those. But is this the same as setting up the CNAME as described above?

Solution

I think there is a slight confusion with terminology here.

A name server is what resolves a human friendly domain name into an IP address.

A CNAME is a DNS record that basically points a domain name at another domain name.

As the name servers for your domain are set to HostMonster, you will need to login and create a CNAME record (sometimes called a "CNAME alias") there. Then, when a DNS request is made for the www.mxsoup.net or secure.mxsoup.net domains, they will resolve to the IP address of web2.sourceaudio.com instead.

edit

You don't need to have a hosting package for the domain if all you want is DNS resolution. It sounds like the domain is just going to be pointing elsewhere. You will likely just need to create an entry for the domain and configure the DNS records.

Comments

[Jashua]

Thanks for the info. As it turns out though, I talked to a different rep at GoDaddy who was able to unconnect from hostmonster, setting the nameservers back to GoDaddy, which then allowed me to configure the DNS settings there.