The ‘A’ stands for ‘address’ and this is the most vital type of DNS record, and shows the IP address of a given domain.
For example if you pull the DNS records of Olitt.com, you will see the ‘A’ record currently showing an IP address of: 95.217.73.231.
Ideally, ‘A’ records only hold Ipv4 addresses, in cases where a site has an Ipv6 address, it will instead use an ‘AAAA’ record.
Here is an example of an A record:
| example.com | record type: | value: | TTL |
| @ | A | 12.34.56.78 | 14400 |
The ‘@’ here indicates that this is a record for the root domain, and the ‘14400’ value is the TTL (Time To Live), given in seconds.
By default, TTL for A records is 14400 seconds. This means that anytime an A record gets updated, it takes 240 minutes (14400 seconds) to take effect.
Most of websites out there only have one A record, but it’s possible to have several.
Typically, some higher profile websites will have several different A records as part of a technique called round robin load balancing, which can distribute request traffic to one of several IP addresses, each hosting identical content.
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