When hosting on Umbraco Cloud you can set up the usage of your own hostname. Doing so will show that you should configure the DNS of your domain to have a CNAME record for your domain that points to dns.umbraco.io.
Not all DNS managers have this possibility however, as pointing the root/apex/main domain itself using only a CNAME does not follow DNS spec if I understand correctly.
If you use something like Cloudflare you can use what they call “CNAME flattening” which somehow still allows CNAME on the root domain.
Otherwise you have to use a subdomain for your web.
However, if you click yourself to this page Managing Hostnames | Umbraco Cloud you can see that it is actually possible to set up regular A-records as well. Great!
There is a recommendation however regarding CNAME’s:
This is recommended to use, if possible, as the record is not changed as often as A & AAAA IPs are.
Given a scenario where using A record is your only recourse, this becomes a bit of a warning which brings about two questions:
How often/when will the A records change?
Will there be a warning before it happens, so one could adjust the records accordingly?
I think it’s best to contact Cloud Support with these questions and it would be good to mention that these types of answers would be great to list on public documentation.
As someone who’s had a great deal of sites on Umbraco Cloud using both methods (A-records to the actual IP, and ALIAS/ANAME to dns.umbraco.io) - I can say the following:
We’ve seen the IPs change a couple of times over 5 or 6 years (so really not that often)
You’ll get several warnings - way ahead of time (and new ones take effect while the old ones are still working, so pretty smooth transitioning)
Of course - this is how it’s been until now - but I have no reason to believe it won’t be just as good going forward
