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I have a a few domains on a hosting provider, with DNS/domain name provided elsewhere. To set up the hosting, I set up an A-record for my domain name, with an IP address; that's all normal, of course. All the domains have the same IP address. I don't know if that's normal or not, but it seems like it probably is, at least for cheap hosting like I'm using.

In the past, I've set up 2 A-records, one bare and one with www, and I have a .htaccess file to redirect ww* to my bare domain. So far, so good.

For the newest one, I tried something new, using one A-record, for the bare domain name, and a CNAME for the www name, which worked OK.

Then, to get fancy, I tried also doing CNAMES for "ww" and "wwww". Those don't work. They give me a default apache web page saying the server works, but there's no content yet.

Since I have no control over anything outside my web space, and there's no default page inside my space, I contacted the hosting provider, who says they set up A-records and CNAMES for us using www or bare name (although the www didn't work without my setting, so I think they may be mistaken here).

My theory is that they don't have it configured correctly for anything other than www or bare, and there's nothing I can do unless they fix it. I'd like to know whether my understanding is correct, or, if not, what I should do differently - or how I can test this better. I tried creating an A-record just like the ones that work for "ww.mydomain.com", but it has the same results, it seems.

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