What is an A Record?

Summary

An A record (Address Record) points a domain or subdomain to an IP address.

A Records

A Records

DNS records are used to control the location of a resource on the Internet. As an example, An A Record is used to point a logical domain name, such as "google.com", to the IP address of Google's hosting server, "74.125.224.147".

These records point traffic from example.com (indicated by @) and ftp.example.com to the IP address 66.147.224.236. They also point localhost.example.com to the server that the domain is hosted on. This allows the end user to type in a human-readable domain, while the computer can continue to work with numbers.

Glossary

Zone File: This is where all the DNS records are stored for a domain.
Host Record: This is the domain or subdomain you wish to use. The @ symbol is used to indicate the root domain itself. In our example the Host Record 'ftp' would be for the subdomain ftp.google.com and '@' would be google.com itself.
Points to: This is the destination server that the domain or subdomain is sending the traffic to.
TTL: The 'time to live' value indicates the amount of time the record is cached by a DNS Server, such as your Internet service provider. The default (and lowest accepted) value is 14400 seconds (4 hours). You do not normally need to modify this value.
Action: This allows you to modify or remove existing records.

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