I’m very new to web hosting. My background is in network installation and hardware repairs. I’ve been given access to a website that was built about a year ago and asked to identify and remove any unnecessary DNS records before a security application is onboarded. (Apparently having additional DNS records adds to the total cost of this security application).
There are a total of 40 records, 20 of which we know for a fact are critical. That leaves 20 unknown. 10 A records, 8 CNAME records, and 2 SRV records.
I’ve done my usual searches online to try find any way I could identify any unused records but I haven’t had any luck.
Is there any way I could find out which of these records are worth keeping without practically deleting and testing the site over and over? (as I’ve seen this be the recommended way, and given my experience, breaking something intentionally isn’t always the best course of action!)
Since the website is already using Cloudflare, have you thought about using Cloudflare as your security solution as well?
Depending on what exactly you’re doing, it’s even free.
Knowing what DNS records are and aren’t used is really hard to say without having knowledge of how exactly your website works, but 40 (or even 20) sounds excesive to me for a single website.
If you share an overview, we could probably tell you what most records are usually used for, and you could then check if that is something that you do have.
But generally, I’d recomend you don’t touch DNS records unless you really understand how the website works.
There isn’t really a way without knowing what the records are for. You can guess based on the information for the record, but that’s it.
For A records, they will point to an IP address, so you can check if that IP is being used elsewhere and if it isn’t then you probably don’t need the record.
For CNAME records, see where they point to and if you don’t have it documented then it can probably go as well.
For SRV records, check the services and ports they are using and see if those are needed.