A Record A Record

What is an A record?

DNS records are used to control the location of a resource on the Internet. A Records are the most basic type of DNS record and are used to point a domain or subdomain to an IP address. The ‘A’ stands for ‘address’. For example, if you query the A records of google.com, it currently returns an IP address of is the IP address of the hosting server for Google's website.

Most of the websites only have one A record, but some have more than one. Some websites host identical contents on several hosting servers with different IP addresses in different geolocations and point their domain name to the IP addresses of those hosting servers. By using a technique called round robin, they can forward users to one of hosting servers to balance the load.

A record format

A typical A record looks like the following in standard BIND format:

$ORIGIN example.com.
@ 3600 IN A 
* 3600 IN A 
ftp 86400 IN A
An anatomy of the A Record @ 3600 IN A looks like the below:
Host Label TTL Record Class Record Type Record Data
example.com. 3600 IN A
Host Label


Record Class
Mainly 3 classes of DNS records exist:

Record Type

Record Data
The data within a DNS answer. For an A record, the record data contains an IP address. Different record types will contain different types of record data.

How to add an A record?

For instructions on how to add an A record with us, you may refer to the tutorial here.

A record glossary

A Record
Maps hostnames to an IP address. For example, the A record for google.com points the IP address

IP Address

IPv4/IPv6 Address

IPv4 address exhaustion



DNS Caching

Authoritative Name Server

DNS Recursive Resolver

Dynamic DNS