What is Arecord.net?

Arecord.net is a service developed by CSS Corp Labs to address a specific issue called Zone Apex on the Cloud & Traditional Computing platforms. For an example, when you host your website in AWS S3, CloudFront or Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), all you have is a URL generated, to use it as a CNAME. A CNAME can be mapped to a sub domain to serve your websiste content, but not to your primary domain (Zone Apex). You will always need a static IP address to solve this issue and that's exactly what Arecord.net does.

How does it work?

It is a pretty simple process to sign up with Arecord.net - all you need is an email address and your own domain that needs to be redirected. Ofcourse, you need to sign up with Arecord.net. We will send you an email address to verify your email address along with a link. Upon successful verification, we will send an another email with the IP address to be used in your DNS A record. Once you configure your A-record in the DNS, Arecord.net will start receiving request for the configured primary domain (Zone Apex) and redirects the request to your "www" sub domain.

If for some reason you are not happy about using it,  you can unsubscribe with the service at any point in time.

How can I use Arecord.net for my website?

Let's assume you have a domain called "example.com" and you are hosting your static website in S3. You can use any tools like CloudBuddy Personal, which comes with a very useful plug-in called "S3Sites" to host your website in S3. Upload your static website content and obtain a URL for your website. Edit your DNS configuration and create a subdomain "www" (www.example.com) and map it to the generated URL as a CNAME. Now, the web traffic for www.example.com should be serving the request from your S3 bucket. But, your primary domain (Zone Apex) will still not be serving the content. ie, if you use example.com, your website will not be found. Edit your DNS configuration and configure the IP address provided by Arecord.net to point to your primary domain (zone Apex). Now, you are all set.

In the similar way, you will have to configure your "www" to the generated URL as a CNAME for other services such as CloudFront and ELB.

How secure & reliable Arecord.net is?

We have taken enough measures to make sure Arecord.net is secure & reliable in all aspects.If you are still not comfortable hosting with us and you want to host Arecord.net by yourself, please contact the Arecord.net team.

Can I use it with other Cloud Service providers?

Ofcourse Yes, you will be able to use it with other service providers such as Microsoft Azure, Rackspace...etc as long as you have the Zone Apex issue with them :-)

what are the Limitations of Arecord.net?

At the moment, Arecord.net cannot redirect to any other sub domain other than "www" and it is running under BETA.

How can I Contribute to Arecord.net?

We welcome your participation, feedback and use cases to decide the feature list required to be supported in Arecord.net going forward. Please write to us at cssinnovations[at]csscorp.com