An application is hosted by a third-party provider at app.example.com. You own the domain company.com and manage its DNS in Amazon Route 53. You want users who visit www.company.com to be directed to the third-party-hosted application. Which Route 53 record type should you create?

A CNAME (Canonical Name) record is the correct choice because it maps an alias domain name (www.company.com) to another canonical domain name (app.example.com). This allows users accessing your domain to be seamlessly redirected to the third-party application. An A record maps a domain name to an IPv4 address, which is not suitable here as you need to point to a hostname, not an IP address. An Alias record is a Route 53-specific extension that maps a domain name to another AWS resource (like an ELB, S3 bucket, or another Route 53 record set), but it doesn't directly point to an external hostname like app.example.com. A Pointer (PTR) record is used for reverse DNS lookups, mapping an IP address to a domain name, which is the opposite of what is needed.