Every single device which is connected to the Internet has a distinctive identifier referred to as IP (Internet Protocol) address. This includes computers, web servers, smartphones, switches, etcetera. The pool of IP addresses, that was introduced at first, has already been distributed, hence the so-called IPv4 IP addresses are steadily being replaced with IPv6 addresses. Every domain which opens a website comes with an IP record, which is the address of the server where it's hosted. When using the IPv4 system, the record is called A and it is comprised of four groups of numbers from 1 to 255 separated with a dot, while in the IPv6 system it's called AAAA and it comprises of 8 groups of hexadecimal numbers i.e. this type of records use digits from 0 to 9 and letters from A to F. An example of an AAAA record is 2010:0c48:43d3:2142:1012:8c3a:2475:2435 and this format supports a significantly bigger number of IPs than the IPv4 format.
AAAA Records in Web Hosting
If you are using a service with a third-party provider and you need to set up an AAAA record to direct a domain address or a subdomain to their system, you are going to be able to do that with only a couple of clicks in the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all of our web hosting packages. When you log in, you will need to visit the DNS Records section where you will find all the records for any domain name or subdomain hosted in the account. Creating a new record is as basic as clicking on a button, picking the type from a drop-down menu, that is to be AAAA in this case, and then inputting the value, or the actual IPv6 address, inside a text box. As an added option you can modify the TTL value (Time To Live), which defines how long the record is active after you change it or erase it in the future. The new AAAA record is going to be operating in just an hour and will propagate around the world two or three hours later, so the hostname for which you have created it will start forwarding to the new server.