Home > Tracking Campaigns > Voluum

---

A Solution to the Voluum CNAME Problem? (1)

---

I love Voluum, but one of the primary deficiencies (in my opinion) of Voluum is the way in which DNS is handled. Namely, custom domains must be CNAMEd to one of Voluum's domains. If one of Voluum's domains gets flagged because some idiot is running malware, your domain could get flagged too because of the CNAME record. One way to think of this is to say "CNAME passes reputation" (in particular, bad reputation). The solution to this is not immediately clear. Ideally, we'd like a DNS configuration which is functionally equivalent to a CNAME, yet masquerades as an A record to the outside world. I believe such a configuration exists, but I'm hoping some DNS experts could weigh in.

I was switching my DNS from Namecheap to NSOne (for those that are not familiar with NSOne, they are a DNS service). In the process I was reading up on DNS in general and NSOne in particular, and came across the ALIAS record. The ALIAS record is not in the DNS specification and is therefore a pseudo-record. There are other DNS services besides NSOne that have ALIAS records, but since it's a pseudo-record they might not all behave the same. So in this post I'm specifically referring to NSOne's ALIAS record.

The ALIAS record is very similar to a CNAME record, with 2 primary differences:
1) It can be used on the root domain (CNAME cannot)
2) It masquerades as an A record to the outside world

So what I'm proposing is to ALIAS a root domain (i.e. your custom domain) to your assigned Voluum domain (using NSOne). When you check the DNS inside Voluum it will tell you that the DNS is not setup correctly of course, but that's just because there's no CNAME record. In this case, if my understanding is correct, even if the Voluum domain gets flagged, your custom domain will not. Only you and NSOne know that your domain is "linked" to the Voluum domain. To the outside world, there is no relation, or at least that is how I understand it.

So, just to be super clear, here's an example:
Let's say your assigned Voluum domain is abc.voluumtrk2.com and your custom tracking domain is track1234.com.

Currently, you must create a subdomain, let's call it redirect.track1234.com and CNAME that to abc.voluumtrk2.com.
What I am now proposing is to ALIAS track1234.com (no subdomain) to abc.voluumtrk2.com

As a test, I ALIASed one of my domains to my assigned Voluum domain, and then checked the A records of both domains from different locations throughout the world. Sure enough, they were identical.

Thoughts?

---

Home > Tracking Campaigns > Voluum