How important is the A record in domain name registration? Is the A record relevant if the nameserver is set with valid nameservers for the hosting server?
So probably the A record is not relevant for me. I am getting a run-around form GoDaddy. Some of the customer support people say I must change the A record and that it is important.
If the A record does not matter when the nameserver in the registration is set then I don’t need to figure out why the A record is not replicating. Can anyone help me understand if the A record actually does not matter?
Thank you. I apologize for not checking in sooner.
I have learned a lot after encountering this problem. Something that someone else found for me is Configure A records - Google Apps Administrator Help that says “Don’t change your domain’s A records if you’re using non-Google services with your domain”.
I did not know what a zone file is and apparently many people do not. Zone files exist in the hosting system and is where most of the resource records (such as A records) exist for most domains. In many (my guess is most) situations, when the registrar is different from the host, the registrar configuration just has name servers (at least two) that point to the hosting company and the other resource records are controlled by the host in a zone file.
Apparently, the zone files are normally created automatically by GoDaddy and probably all major hosting services. For some reason there was a problem for my account, probably because GoDaddy was changing my plan to something new. It took the GoDaddy people a week to understand the problem and fix it. Some of their people understood but not all of them.
Currently, when I go into my GoDaddy account and then go to domains (not my hosting plan) then my domains are listed, even though they are registered with Google, not GoDaddy. From there I can get to the zone file for my domain. The IP address that was there (after GoDaddy fixed the zone files) is the one that appeared when I did a nslookup or anything like that for the domain, so that (the zone file) is what was being used. So in other words, even after fixing the zone files, the A records were not yet updated. The A record in Google had the correct IP address for my web sites but that IP address was not replicating. When GoDaddy finally fixed the zone files and when I changed the A records there, the correct IP address was finally replicated throughout the world (in just a couple of hours) and my web sites began working after a week of not working.
I hope that that is not too much for someone to read if they need help such as that and that this does help.
I had become frustrated with GoDaddy for another reason in addition to the DNS problem. So I tried Microsoft Azure. Azure has something called Azure DNS. If we do not use Azure DNS for a web site (Microsoft calls them Web Apps) then the A record and other records are configured in the registrar. Using Azure DNS, the A record and other records are configured in Azure.
DNS is complicated and most people do not understand it enough. So it can be confusing.
Look Their are two ways to manage the DNS at GODADDY or any other domain registator
1. Use the name server of domain registator:- If you are using the name server of domain registator in that case you can use A, CNAME, MX and various other kinds of records to point out at your hosting provider and email services provider.
2. Use the name server of hosting provider:- If you enter the name server of hosting provider at domain registator in that case you don’t need to do anything else.
Now what i suggest you to do is if your hosting and and email services provider are different then use the name server of godaddy and point the A record toward the hosting provider and point the MX record toward the email services provider else simplly point the NS toward the hosting provider.
I know everything about DNS you can let me know if you need any help.
Registrars do not provide nameservers, we specify in the registrar where the nameserver is at. Depending on the nameserver, the A record(s) is either specified in the registrar or in the host.
Normally, you use “A” record if you just want to point your domain name to a server’s IP address to open a website hosted on that server. This will not allow server to receive emails, so it is good if you host mailserver separately. But if you wish to have all services on the same server, you’d point your domain to the appropriate nameservers instead of using “A” record.
There’s a lot of confused information here. You need to understand what’s going on with DNS.
An A record is used to map a specific domain name to an IP address. This is the most common type of DNS query made. So, for example, when I type in “www.sitepoint.com” to access this site, my machine makes a DNS query with query type set to A to find the IP address for this site.
To look up the IP address of a site, DNS follows a chain of queries from nameservers. Part of this chain is just built-in, and implicit. When you type in www.sitepoint.com, this is what happens:
Your machine implicitly puts a “.” at the end, so it’s really looking up “www.sitepoint.com.”
Chaining begins. Your machine (or the nameserver it queries) connects to one of the nameservers for the root of the chain, in this case “.”. (Yes, I’m serious. That last “.” added implicitly is where everything starts.) The IP addresses of these nameservers simply have to be known. This is a basic security problem with DNS.
The machine doing the querying then asks “.” for the list of nameservers that serve the next level up, in this case “.com”. It does this by using a query type of NS (short for nameserver).
It picks from one of the servers in the list returned for “.com”, connects to that server.
It then queries that server for the nameserver for the “sitepoint.com.” domain. This will again be a query of type NS.
It connects to one of the servers returned for “sitepoint.com.” and issues the final query for “www.sitepoint.com.”. This query will be of type A, because it’s the end of the chain. The appropriate query is for the IP address, not another name server.
You can actually see all this working yourself. On Mac or Linux/Unix machines, use the command “nslookup”. Trying setting the query type to NS (set type=ns). Then just type in . and see the results. You can walk up the chain by hand.
In the real world, there are a lot of shortcuts taken. For example, rather than look up www.sitepoint.com every time you go back to the site, your system will usually cache the first response and reuse it.
So, a nameserver can have an A record (because a nameserver is a machine with an IP address), but it doesn’t have to have one. It’s a good idea to give it one, though, for consistency. Technically, when a system makes a query about a nameserver, the response could just be the symbolic name, after which there would need to be a second lookup to map that symbolic name to an IP address. Which is to say, it can happen that, to reach a nameserver, the querying server has to do an A record query.
Unfortunately @hodgreeley, it think that is too much detail for most people.
I think that for most of us at least, there must be at least one relevant A record somewhere for our domain. It might be in the registrar’s system or it might be in the same system as the domain is hosted but there must be at least one somewhere. Where it (the relevant one) is at depends on the domain’s server (the server is usually the hosting company). So it is easier when the registrar and the hosting company is the same. I say “relevant” since as you say, we can have an A record in other places that have no affect.