As mentioned in the comments, you will need to use A records instead of CNAME records. CNAME records will not be able to point at an IP Address. The key to making each of the sites to work is to specify ServerName correctly for each virtual server in your Apache config.
Yes you can. It is called round-robin DNS, and the browser just chooses one of them randomly. It is a well used method of getting cheap load balancing, but if one host goes down, users will still try to access it.
You can see that the CNAME and subsequent record have different TTLs by using dig.. dig docs.nwesd.org ; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P3 <<>> docs.nwesd.org ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 28244 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;docs.nwesd.org. … Read more
The most likely explanation is a user unfamiliar with DNS tried to configure the DNS records and made a mistake that’s glaringly obvious to anyone familiar with DNS, but not to people who aren’t. While a DNS label can be any arbitary binary data generally, you should read the rest of section 11, in particular: … Read more
The difference between having an A record vs CNAME for www would be an extra look up. In case of the CNAME the after figuring out that www is a CNAME to example.com, another look will be done for example.com. Other than that if you are planning to use a CDN or a 3 party … Read more
Never you mind the comments section below, and never you mind the previous answers in the edit history. After about an hour of some conversation with friends (thank you @joeQwerty, @Iain, and @JourneymanGeek), and some jovial hacking around we got to the bottom of both your question and the situation on the whole. Sorry for … Read more
So you are not looking at redirection as such (as that happens at the app level, i.e. on Apache/Nginx/wherever) but rather on the DNS resolution. The host on which DomainA is hosted will or should never be hit, based on your description as you want the DNS requests to be resolved to the IPs of … Read more
The whole idea behind the MX record is to specify a host or hosts which can accept mail for a domain. As specified in RFC 1035, the MX record contains a domain name. It must therefore point to a host which itself can be resolved in the DNS. An IP address could not be used … Read more