Why is CNAME pointing to IP instead of URL?

Question

My CNAME setting is

I expect ms.fbny.org to be an alias of music-school.fbny.org. However when I go to ms.fbny.org, it actually goes to music-school.fbny.org's IP instead of music-school.fbny.org itself. So it is opening another website hosted on the same IP. Is this a normal behavior?

Answer 1

Yes, this is the default behavior. The web server should be configured to serve from the correct document root when the request comes from a specific subdomain.

For example, if you use apache, you should configure virtual hosts appropriately.

Ref: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/vhosts/examples.html

Above page contains the below example:

# Ensure that Apache listens on port 80
Listen 80
<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/www/example1"
    ServerName www.example.com

    # Other directives here
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/www/example2"
    ServerName www.example.org

    # Other directives here
</VirtualHost>

Request from www.example.org will be served from the folder /www/example2 and those from www.example.com will be served from /www/example1. Moreover, apache considers the first entry to be the default when there is no match for a server name.

(In case you use apache) your new subdomain (for which you had created a CNAME) may not be having a matching entry and hence default document root of the main domain is being used.