What is a Wildcard DNS record?

A wildcard DNS record is a record that answers DNS requests for any subdomain you haven't already defined. You can create wildcard A records and CNAME records by entering an asterisk (*) in the Host field when creating a DNS record.

For example, if you create the wildcard A record  *.goosehollow.design and someone visits abcdef.goosehollow.design, their request will resolve to the IP address you specified as the answer for your wildcard record.

There are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to wildcard DNS records, so read on.

DNS lookups for your root domain (the part of your domain after the "www.") won't return the wildcard record as you might expect. You'll need to add a matching root record (empty Host field) or lookups will fail if your visitor omits the "www."

When you set a wildcard record, that record does not override any existing subdomain records in the zone (zone is another term for all the DNS records associated with your domain). Here's an example:

In this example, there are two A records. There's a wildcard record that has an answer of 192.0.79.138 and there's another A record for the "example.goosehollow.design" subdomain with a different answer.

If we query a random subdomain such as "test.goosehollow.design" we'll see the answer from the wildcard record:

However, if we query the "example" subdomain we created with a different answer, we'll always see a response showing the answer from that specific record:

The wildcard record picks up on all subdomains except for any that you've specified with their own DNS records.

If you have any other questions or concerns about creating wildcard DNS records, feel free to get in touch with our support team for assistance.