The A Record points your hostname to an IP address. The record A specifies IP address (IPv4) for given host. This is one of the most frequently used records in the DNS Zones.
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 simplecloudhosting.net website you enter www.simplecloudhosting.net. At our name server there is an A record that points to the IP address 165.227.31.181. This means that a request from your browser to www.simplecloudhosting.net is directed to the server with IP address 165.227.31.181.
A Records are the simplest type of DNS records, yet one of the primary records used in DNS servers.
Both of these records map a host to an IP address. The "A" record is used to map a host to an IPv4 IP address, while "AAAA" records are used to map a host to an IPv6 address.
The general format of these records is this:
host IN A IPv4_address host IN AAAA IPv6_address
So since our SOA record called out a primary master server at "ns1.domain.com", we would have to map this to an address to an IP address since "ns1.domain.com" is within the "domain.com" zone that this file is defining.
The record could look something like this:
ns1 IN A 111.222.111.222
Notice that we don't have to give the full name. We can just give the host, without the FQDN and the DNS server will fill in the rest with the $ORIGIN value. However, we could just as easily use the entire FQDN if we feel like being semantic:
ns1.domain.com. IN A 111.222.111.222
In most cases, this is where you'll define your web server as "www":
www IN A 222.222.222.222
We should also tell where the base domain resolves to. We can do this like this:
domain.com. IN A 222.222.222.222
We could have used the "@" to refer to the base domain instead:
@ IN A 222.222.222.222
We also have the option of resolving anything that under this domain that is not defined explicitly to this server too. We can do this with the "*" wild card:
* IN A 222.222.222.222
All of these work just as well with AAAA records for IPv6 addresses.
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