DNS Record Types: A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT

When you buy a domain name like acy-partner.com, you have not really set anything up yet. A domain on its own is just a name nobody knows how to find. The magic that turns that name into a working website, a working email address, and a dozen other things behind the scenes is a small collection of settings called DNS records.

If you have ever opened your domain’s control panel and felt overwhelmed by a grid of cryptic rows labelled A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, and TXT, this article is for you. We will walk through each common record type one at a time, in plain language, so that the next time you need to point a domain somewhere you actually understand what you are doing.

What a DNS record actually is

DNS stands for the Domain Name System. The simplest way to picture it is as the phone book of the internet. People remember names; computers talk to each other using numbers (IP addresses). DNS is the lookup table that translates the human-friendly name into the machine-friendly number.

A DNS record is just one entry in that phone book. Each record has a few basic parts:

A name (which part of the domain it applies to, like www or the bare domain itself).
A type (A, CNAME, MX, and so on — this is what tells the internet what kind of information the record holds).
A value (the actual answer — an IP address, another name, some text).
A TTL (time to live — how long others are allowed to cache the answer before checking again, measured in seconds).

You do not edit these records on the website’s server. You edit them at your DNS provider — usually the company you bought the domain from (the registrar), or a dedicated DNS service. That control panel is where every record below lives.

Records live with your domain, not your site

It is a common surprise: your website files might be on one company’s server, but the DNS records that point people to them are managed somewhere else entirely. If a record needs changing, you go to wherever your domain’s DNS is hosted — not your hosting dashboard.

The A record: name to IPv4 address

The A record is the most fundamental record of all. It maps a name to an IPv4 address — the classic kind of IP address that looks like 203.0.113.10.

When someone types acy-partner.com into their browser, their computer asks DNS, “What is the address for this name?” The A record answers with a number, and the browser then knows which server to connect to.

acy-partner.com.    A    203.0.113.10

Read that as: “The name acy-partner.com has the IPv4 address 203.0.113.10.” You will almost always have at least one A record, because without it the bare domain points to nothing.

The AAAA record: name to IPv6 address

The AAAA record (yes, four A’s, usually pronounced “quad-A”) does exactly the same job as an A record, but for IPv6 addresses instead of IPv4.

IPv6 is the newer, much larger addressing system the internet is gradually moving to, because the older IPv4 pool ran out of room. An IPv6 address looks longer and uses colons, like 2001:db8::1.

acy-partner.com.    AAAA    2001:db8::1

You do not have to choose between A and AAAA — you can (and often should) have both. Visitors on an IPv6 connection will use the AAAA record; visitors on IPv4 will use the A record. They simply describe the same destination in two different address formats.

The CNAME record: an alias to another name

A CNAME record (short for Canonical Name) is the “see also” of DNS. Instead of pointing a name at an IP address, it points one name at another name.

The classic example is the www subdomain. Rather than repeating the IP address in two places, you can say “www.acy-partner.com is just an alias for acy-partner.com,” and let the second name carry the real address.

www.acy-partner.com.    CNAME    acy-partner.com.

Now whenever someone asks about www, DNS effectively replies, “Go look up acy-partner.com instead,” and follows the chain to find the actual IP. The big advantage is maintenance: if the underlying IP ever changes, you only update it in one place (the A record on acy-partner.com) and every alias pointing to it follows along automatically.

The bare-domain CNAME gotcha

You generally cannot put a CNAME on the bare (root) domain — acy-partner.com with no prefix. The rules of DNS forbid mixing a CNAME with other records, and the root name almost always needs other records (like MX for email). Use CNAME for subdomains such as www, blog, or shop, and use A/AAAA for the root.

The MX record: where email goes

So far every record has been about web traffic. The MX record (Mail eXchanger) is different — it tells the world which servers handle email for your domain.

When someone sends a message to hello@acy-partner.com, their mail system looks up the MX records for acy-partner.com to discover where to deliver it. Without an MX record, mail to your domain has nowhere to go.

MX records have one extra detail: a priority number. Lower numbers are tried first, which lets you list a primary mail server and one or more backups.

acy-partner.com.    MX    10    mail1.acy-partner.com.
acy-partner.com.    MX    20    mail2.acy-partner.com.

Here, mail tries mail1 first (priority 10); if that is unreachable, it falls back to mail2 (priority 20). Notice the MX value is a name, not an IP — that name then needs its own A/AAAA record so the sending server can find its address.

The TXT record: free-form text for verification and email rules

The TXT record is the most flexible of the bunch. It simply holds arbitrary text, and over the years that flexibility has been put to many practical uses.

Two everyday uses you will run into:

Domain verification. Many services (search consoles, email platforms, cloud providers) ask you to prove you own a domain. They give you a unique string, you add it as a TXT record, and they check that it appears — confirming you really control the DNS.
Email authentication. Standards like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are all stored as TXT records. They help receiving mail servers decide whether a message claiming to come from your domain is legitimate, which cuts down on spoofing and spam.

acy-partner.com.    TXT    "v=spf1 include:_spf.example.com ~all"
acy-partner.com.    TXT    "google-site-verification=AbC123xyz..."

You do not need to memorise that syntax. Just know that when a service hands you a long string to “paste into a TXT record,” this is the record type it means.

The NS record: who is in charge of the domain

One more you will see is the NS record (Name Server). NS records say which servers are authoritative for your domain — that is, which servers hold the real, official set of records we have been discussing.

acy-partner.com.    NS    ns1.example-dns.com.
acy-partner.com.    NS    ns2.example-dns.com.

These are usually set automatically when you point your domain at a DNS provider, so you rarely edit them by hand. But they are worth understanding: if your NS records point to the wrong place, none of your other records will take effect, because the world is asking the wrong servers.

Quick reference table

Here is everything side by side. This little table is the one thing worth bookmarking.

Record	Full name	Points a name to…	Typical use
A	Address	An IPv4 address	The main website address
AAAA	Quad-A	An IPv6 address	The same site, over IPv6
CNAME	Canonical Name	Another name (alias)	`www` and other subdomains
MX	Mail eXchanger	A mail server name (with priority)	Receiving email
TXT	Text	Free-form text	Verification, SPF/DKIM/DMARC
NS	Name Server	A DNS server name	Who controls the domain

Changes take a little time

After you edit a record, the update is not always instant. Because answers are cached around the internet for the length of the TTL, a change can take anywhere from a few minutes to a day to be seen everywhere. If something looks wrong right after editing, give it some time before assuming you made a mistake.

Putting it all together

Imagine setting up a fresh domain for a small company. A realistic starter set of records might look like this:

acy-partner.com.        A      203.0.113.10
acy-partner.com.        AAAA   2001:db8::1
www.acy-partner.com.    CNAME  acy-partner.com.
acy-partner.com.        MX     10  mail.acy-partner.com.
acy-partner.com.        TXT    "v=spf1 include:_spf.example.com ~all"

In plain English: the website lives at one IPv4 and one IPv6 address, www is an alias to the root, email is handled by a dedicated mail server, and a TXT record protects outgoing mail. Six lines, and the domain is fully wired up for both web and email.

Recap and where to go next

DNS records feel intimidating only until you see what each one is for. To recap:

A and AAAA turn a name into an IP address (IPv4 and IPv6 respectively).
CNAME is an alias that points one name at another name.
MX tells mail where to be delivered, using priority numbers.
TXT holds plain text, most often for verification and email security.
NS declares which servers are authoritative for the whole domain.

You edit all of these in the same place — your DNS provider’s control panel — and changes propagate gradually thanks to caching. Once these click, the natural next steps are understanding how the lookup actually travels across the internet, what TTL values you should choose, and how the email-security records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) fit together. Each of those builds directly on the foundation you now have.