Bluehost Web Hosting Help

What Is an A Record? How To Edit an A Record

Summary

A record (Address Record) points a domain or subdomain to an IP address. For example, you can use it for store.website.com or blog.website.com and point it to where you have your store. This is a common practice for people who use Amazon, eBay, Tumblr, etc.

A Records

A Records

DNS records are used to control the location of a resource on the Internet. As an example, an A Record is used to point a logical domain name, such as "google.com", to the IP address of Google's hosting server, "74.125.224.147".

These records point traffic from example.com (indicated by @) and ftp.example.com to the IP address 66.147.224.236. They also point localhost.example.com to the server that the domain is hosted on. This allows the end user to type in a human-readable domain, while the computer can continue to work with numbers.

Updating an A Record

To learn more about updating an A Record, please see DNS Management - How to Add, Edit, and Delete Records.

Glossary

Zone File:: This is where all the DNS records are stored for a domain.
Host Record:: This is the domain or subdomain you wish to use. The @ symbol is used to indicate the root domain itself. In our example the Host Record 'ftp' would be for the subdomain ftp.google.com and '@' would be google.com itself.
Points to:: This is the destination server that the domain or subdomain is sending the traffic to.
TTL:
: The 'time to live' value indicates the amount of time the record is cached by a DNS Server, such as your Internet service provider. The default (and lowest accepted) value is 14400 seconds (4 hours). You do not normally need to modify this value.
Action:: This allows you to modify or remove existing records.