Using wildcard DNS record
Using wildcard in DNS A or CNAME can reduce maintenance work, but this also has some drawback.
Pros
Updating DNS will take time, not only needs time to edit DNS entries, but also the DNS broadcast time, which can take more than 30 minutes to update an existing entry in other DNS server, and some DNS server can take even longer.
If use widecard, there is no editing requirement.
Cons
Search suffix
If /etc/resolv.conf
has entry as below
search example.com
When searching for google.com
, It might hit google.com.example.com
if wildcard used, because google.com.example.com
will return IP address as same as example.com
.
Caching
Without editing entry, the some DNS servers might still caching old data. For example, if you have both wildcard *.example.com and a specific entry ftp.example.com, and you decided to remove ftp.example.com, the wildcard might not take effect.
Accessing non-exist domain
If using browser access undefined domain name, and hit the web server, using NGINX can perform redirect to change URL. This can fix the issues which web coding based on current URL.
server {
listen 80;
server_name *.mywebsite.tld;
return 301 $scheme://mywebsite.tld$request_uri;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name mywebsite.tld;
[...]
}