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I am inexperienced in the configuration of DNS and have an issue with domain hosting set up.

I have two domains: 'www.mydomain1.com' and 'www.mydomain2.com', with mydomain2 pointed to the same place as mydomain1.

The domains were passed to me recently by the person who previously controlled them. I have an account with fasthosts in the UK. When I accepted the domains I could not access the DNS settings and inquired with fasthosts as to why. The reply said

The delegate hosting option for both domains were enabled and this is the reason why you were unable to find the option to edit the advanced DNS records.

I have now disabled the delegate hosting option so you can now edit the advanced DNS records for both domains in your account.

When I log into the fasthost control panel now I can access the DNS controls but both domains have no A record or CNAME record set up. I am concerned that fasthosts have blatted the previous Nameserver entries and set me up on theirs but not added any record. 'www.mydomain1.com' currently still works but 'www.mydomain2.com' does not find the site anymore. I am worried I will lose mydomain1 too as the DNS changes propagate through the system.

My webhosting is at 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/mydomain1.com/' and this is where I want both domains to point. Any advice would be much appreciated.

One thing which is confusing to me is that because I am on a shared server I have to put 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/mydomain1.com/' to get to my site rather than just 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx'. The form on fasthosts for the aname record only allows an IP to be entered - does it add the mydomain1.com/ onto the end itself?

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A records point to an IP address, not to an URL. The "/mydomain1.com/" part is not necessary, because the server will see that you have entered http://mydomain1.com/ and not http://x.x.x.x/.

When a browser requests http://example.com/, it adds a "Host: example.com" header to the request, so the server knows which directory to serve files from. Older browsers might be missing that header. In that case the default website for x.x.x.x will be shown (depending on server configuration).

The http://x.x.x.x/example.com/ is special configuration in the server, to let you check how the website looks while you don't yet have example.com configured.

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