Question 1

What is a hostname lookup?

Accepted Answer

It uses DNS to translate a human-readable name such as example.com into the numeric IP addresses computers use for routing.

Question 2

What is the canonical name?

Accepted Answer

The final target after following the CNAME chain. CDNs use it to map your domain to an edge hostname.

Question 3

Why are there multiple IPs?

Accepted Answer

Load balancing and multi-homing. Several A/AAAA records spread traffic across multiple servers so a single failure does not take the site down.