I am struggling with the details of my domains DNS details.While I found some information on the different types of records (A, CNAME and MX)on Wikipedia and in Stackoverflow, I don't know what the different Hosts like * and @ mean.In my case for example, the top two lines with @ and * point to the same IP.
What are the Hosts and the Records in my Domains DNS?
web hosting;dns
The @ record signifies what your domain name itself resolves to. So if your domain is example.com, that record controls what example.com (with nothing in front of it) resolves to.The * record is a wildcard record. If present, these control what any hostname not covered by another record would resolve to. E.g. foo.example.com, abc123fsjfkslfs.example.com and so on. You don't have to have a wildcard DNS record - if this wasn't there, these hostnames wouldn't resolve to anything.It is common for both of these records to point to the same IP, which in your case will be the IP address of your web server. Assuming your screenshot covers all of the DNS records for your domain, the first is what allows http://example.com/ to work, and the second will allow http://www.example.com/ to work (since you don't have a separate www A record).