I was able to finally purchase .com for our domain. The catch is that I have public sites running on subdomains on my .net domain that I don’t want to touch (ex: app.domain.net). I am wanting to just have users that type in domain.net to redirect to domain.com. I am not clear on this, CNAME, A Record to match domain.com, or if I am going to have to have a redirect on the domain.net site.
What is the best way to do this without causing issues for the subdomains? TYIA
You can do this probably 6-10 different ways (at least), and some of them depend on who your DNS provider is, who your registrar is, and what web software/system/host you’re using. If your web host will accept either domain for a site, you can just point an A record at the same IP address as the .com and both will work–keep in mind you can’t use a CNAME for your apex domain (the non-subdomain root one) as that’s unsupported, you need an A record there. CNAMEs are fine for subomains, to essentially “clone” the IP of another domain–but the host users visit must be expecting that domain/hostname to return the right website.
Redirecting is an option as well, in one or both directions, but redirects are handled by a web server not DNS–you point the DNS to the redirecting webhost and it sends a redirect response to the new location. Some domain registrars offer this service, usually for free, and you could do that, but keep in mind most only redirect non-encrypted web traffic (HTTP and not HTTPS)–redirecting HTTPS traffic requires a valid certificate. There are third party services like https://redirect.pizza/ that can do this for you with a certificate, if you want/need secure redirects as well.
Unfortunately, without more information around your web host, DNS provider, and registrar, this is all general information and not specific to your situation because capabilities of each vary.