Glossary Entry
What is A Record?
What A Record actually means, buzzwords removed — with the example that makes it land.
The short answer
An A record ties a hostname to an IPv4 address, and it is the DNS entry telling a browser which machine serves your website.
The rest of the page opens it up — the mechanics, why a site owner should care, and one concrete example of it at work.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
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Terms in the jargon buster
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People, if you get stuck
It carries the load in web DNS: ask for example.com, receive 203.0.113.10, and the browser now knows which machine to call. AAAA does the same job for IPv6, and between them they turn names into places packets can genuinely reach.
Put two A records on one name and traffic alternates between the addresses, which is a crude way to spread load and equally the classic accident when an edit adds a record instead of replacing the one already there.
A way to picture A Record
The final coordinates at the end of the trail. Query handling can be passed along by other record types, but the chain has to end somewhere at a real machine traffic can reach.
Any analogy flattens the detail, naturally — but this one is solid enough to think with, and thinking is what a jargon buster is for.
Why this term earns a page
Aim a domain at hosting without relocating the zone and the A record is what you set. And when a site flips at random between the old server and the new, a leftover second A record is nearly always the reason.
That, incidentally, is the bar for any technical term — not 'could I lecture on it' but 'would I recognise it as the answer to my problem'. For this one, you now would.
How it turns up day to day
Keeping DNS with a third party, an owner aims only the website here with a single A record pointed at our server's address, while mail and every other record stay exactly where they were.
Scale that example across every website online and you have described the whole job of the concept in one stroke.
Where it sits inside your own account
You will meet it in the control panel and now and then in a support thread, usually already set correctly. If this one landed, the natural follow-ups are CNAME Record, DNS, IP Address and Nameserver.
Support means a person at any hour, and the remit covers the awkward practical questions other hosts hand straight back.
Unexplained jargon slows everybody down
Sooner or later every confusing hosting term turns into a support ticket, so we defined the hundred commonest ones properly — once, in the same plain English we use with customers.
A copy is taken daily on every plan, and putting a file or a database back is one click in the panel rather than a support ticket.
- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Jargon-free by design
Definitions written for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — translation rather than restatement.
Clear about how deep to go
Most of these are recognise-level rather than operate-level, and every entry says which it is.
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Nothing teaches a hosting term faster than finding it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
The platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and your setup becomes something you know instead of hope.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — CNAME Record, DNS and IP Address finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- cPanel, which is what most of the industry already runs
- Your existing site brought across by our engineers, at no charge
- Mailboxes that answer at the name you hold
- PHP versions set per site from the control panel
- NVMe SSD storage on every tier, not only the dear ones
- A daily copy, with restores you run yourself from the panel
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- WordPress Toolkit, with the updates seen to for you
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
A record or CNAME — which do I use?
An A record names a number, while a CNAME names another hostname and takes on whatever that resolves to. Use an A record when you are aiming straight at a server, and a CNAME for services that publish a hostname precisely so the addresses beneath it can move.
My new A record has not taken. What now?
Three suspects: caching, because the previous TTL is still running down; the edit went to DNS the domain does not delegate to; or a second, conflicting record survived. Work down that list in order and almost nothing else remains to find.
Which control panel do accounts use?
cPanel, the panel the industry standardised on long ago. Every tutorial you find online will match what is on your screen, your backups restore onto any other cPanel host, and the skills stay useful for life. Plesk and DirectAdmin are available on particular plans if you prefer either.
What is the uptime commitment, and what happens in a month that misses it?
99.9% — and if a month falls below that through a fault on our side, our terms entitle you to a pro-rated credit; ask and we apply it. Calling it a target rather than a contractual SLA is a deliberate choice. Hardware and network faults surface through platform monitoring, usually before the first customer notices.
Keep reading
IP Address
An IP address is a machine's numeric identity on the network, the real destination sitting behind every dom…
DNS (Domain Name System)
The internet's lookup system is DNS, converting the names people remember into the numeric addresses and ro…
How to Create an SPF Record
Step by step, with every snag flagged before you get to it.
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