dotvitals

The domain has no A or AAAA record

HighConfirmedQuick windns.records.no-address-record

What this check looks for

Nothing on the internet knows where to find this domain. A browser asked to open it gets no address back, so the site cannot load at all.

Why it matters

This is total unreachability, not a degradation: every visitor, every API client and every link to the domain fails immediately. It is also invisible in a browser that still has the old address cached, which is why it can run for hours unnoticed.

When the check passes, your report says: “The domain resolves to an address a browser can reach”.

What it costs your score

When this check fails it removes 25 points from your DNS score, before the status, confidence and repeat multipliers are applied. DNS carries a weight of 10 in the overall score.

It shares the dns.records.address family ceiling of 30 points: however many findings that family produces, together they cannot remove more than that from DNS. One underlying problem showing up in several places is still one problem.

Severity
high
Default confidence
confirmed
Status when triggered
fail
Deduction
25 points
Family cap
dns.records.address · 30
Category
DNS
Module
Dns records
Fix owned by
dns host
In the ruleset since
2026.09

How the whole score is calculated

How to fix it

Publish an A record (and ideally an AAAA record) pointing at your web server.

Without one, nothing can reach the domain.

  1. Find the public IP address of the server or platform that should answer for this domain.

  2. Add an A record at the apex (@ in most control panels) with that IPv4 address.

  3. Add an AAAA record with the IPv6 address if your host has one.

  4. If the site is hosted on a platform that gives you a hostname rather than an IP, use that platform's ALIAS/ANAME/flattened-CNAME record type at the apex — a plain CNAME there is invalid.

How to confirm it worked

  • dig +short A ‹domain› — expect the address you published

The configuration to publish
{{domain}}. 3600 IN A {{ipv4}}

A named slot like ‹domain› — and the braces left in the configuration below — is filled in with your own values when this rule appears on a report.

Remediation by platform

Generic DNS
‹domain›. 3600 IN A ‹ipv4›
Cloudflare
DNS → Records → Add record → Type: A, Name: @, IPv4 address: ‹ipv4›
Technical detail

No A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6) record was found at ‹domain›. The lookup returned: ‹lookup result›. RFC 1034 §3.6.1 makes an address record the only way a name becomes reachable; MX, TXT and NS records do not help a browser. If the domain is deliberately not a website — a mail-only or verification-only domain — this finding is expected and can be dismissed, but a redirect to your real site still needs an address record to redirect *from*.

Standards and references

Test this on your domain

Run the check that produces this finding, on its own, against any domain.

Open the dns records checkerBuild the fix

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