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.