Where Websites Come To Life
What is an A record?
Posted: May 14th, 2018
An A record maps a domain name to the IP address (IPv4) of the computer hosting the domain. Simply put, an A record is used to find the IP address of a computer connected to the internet from a name.
The A in A record stands for Address. Whenever you visit a web site, send an email, connect to Twitter or Facebook or do almost anything on the Internet, the address you enter is a series of words connected with dots.
For example, to access the DNSimple website you enter www.kekhost.com. At our name server there is an A record that points to the IP address 209.172.49.216. This means that a request from your browser to www.kekhost.com is directed to the server with IP address 2209.172.49.216.
A Records are the simplest type of DNS records, yet one of the primary records used in DNS servers.
You can actually do quite a bit more with A records, including using multiple A records for the same domain in order to provide redundancy. Additionally, multiple names could point to the same address, in which case each would have its own A record pointing to that same IP address.
Querying A records
You can use dig to determine the A record associated to a domain name. The result is contained in the ANSWER section and it contains the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), the remaining time-to-live (TTL) and the IP address.
A record format
In KEKhost we represent A record with the following information:
Name The host name for the record, without the domain name. This is generally referred as “subdomain”. We automatically append the domain name.
TTL The time-to-live in seconds. This is the amount of time the record is allowed to be cached by a resolver.
Address The IPv4 address the A record points to.
kekhost.com. 86400 IN A 209.172.49.216
Article sourced from DNSimple.com.