DNS Helper

A / AAAA

An A record points a name straight at an IPv4 address, the numeric address every device on the internet still ultimately needs to reach anything. An AAAA record does exactly the same job for an IPv6 address instead, the newer, much larger address format brought in because the internet ran out of IPv4 addresses to hand out years ago. Same purpose, same rules for both, only the address format and the record's own name differ.

Plenty of domains carry both an A and an AAAA record for the same name, so a visitor's device can reach it over whichever address family their own network actually supports. For how your own panel labels the Name, Type, Value and TTL fields around these values, see the Interface page, none of that changes for A or AAAA specifically.

Round robin: more than one address for the same name

A name isn't limited to a single A or AAAA record. Add several, all under the same name, and a resolver hands back all of them, typically in a different order each time, a pattern called round robin. It's a simple way to spread visitors across more than one server without anything clever happening in DNS itself: the client chooses from the addresses it received, and DNS never tests which of them is actually reachable.

Two ordinary A records, same name, different addresses, nothing more unusual about either one than that.

This comes up more often than it might seem to. Some hosting platforms are commonly connected by adding several A records rather than a single one, precisely so no single server is a bottleneck, Wix being one current example. If a platform's own setup instructions list more than one IP address for the same record, this is usually why, it's not a mistake to fix, it's meant to be there.

One thing round robin does not do: it isn't failover. Nothing in DNS checks whether an address actually answers, so if one of several servers is offline, DNS will still hand its address out along with the rest. Some visitors will simply reach a server that isn't there. Genuine failover needs something extra watching those servers and pulling a failed one out, DNS on its own just rotates blindly through whatever list it was given.

Cloudflare's proxy can affect A and AAAA records the same way it affects CNAME: a proxied record answers with Cloudflare's own address rather than the real one, which can hide the record from a domain ownership check the same way it does for a CNAME. Covered in more depth on the CNAME page, since that's where it shows up most often.