What is a DNS A record?

About

An A is a type of DNS record that maps a domain name to a IP address Version 4.

Example

api                                 IN A      164.132.99.202

where:

• api is a relative name
• IN is the INTERNET class
• A is the A record.
• 164.132.99.202 is the Ip address

If the apex domain is example.com, this entry will point the qualified domain name api.example.com to the ip 164.132.99.202 (if there is only one A record entry)

Name and A records Relationship

A name may have several A records in case of load balancing. The DNS server needs to support it.

For instance, the DNS proxy feature of Cloudflare that caches the origin IP is load-balanced and will return 2 addresses.

Documentation / Reference

• See Rfc1035