DNS records and proxy status

Each active Dots lease supports one DNS record.

A record

Use A when your service has a public IPv4 address. Enter only the address, for example 192.0.2.10 in documentation; use your real public address in the panel. Private, loopback, link-local, multicast, and other non-public ranges are rejected.

CNAME record

Use CNAME when another hostname is the canonical destination, for example app.example.net. Enter a hostname only—no https://, port, path, query, or wildcard. It cannot point to the same Dots hostname.

What “DNS only” means

Dots always creates records with Cloudflare proxying disabled. DNS resolvers receive your configured destination directly. Dots does not carry, inspect, cache, filter, accelerate, or hide your web traffic. Your destination address may be publicly discoverable, and Dots does not provide TLS certificates, hosting, DDoS protection, or origin privacy.

Cloudflare is the authoritative DNS management provider used by Dots; it is not a traffic proxy for customer records in the initial product.

Changes and failures

Your panel distinguishes the record you requested from the latest state observed at the DNS provider. Updates are queued and reconciled so a timeout does not create a duplicate record. If a change fails, the prior provider state may continue until a retry or staff review. Status and timestamps in the panel are authoritative for the control-plane operation; DNS caches can take additional time to expire.

Suspension or expiry disables the record. Restoring a lease is an explicit decision, not an automatic consequence of changing the destination.