EMZETT.AAAA Record
In short: A DNS record type that directly maps a domain name to an IPv6 address — the IPv6 counterpart to the A record.
In more detail: The name “AAAA” isn’t a typo: an IPv6 address is four times as long as an IPv4 address (128 instead of 32 bits), hence the quadrupled “A”. A domain can have both an A and an AAAA record at the same time, so both IPv4- and IPv6-capable clients can reach it (“dual-stack”).
In Depth
Structure
The structure follows exactly that of the A record, just with an IPv6 address as the value:
emzett-digital.com. 3600 IN AAAA 2606:4700:3033::6815:1515
IPv6 addresses are written in eight groups of four hexadecimal characters each, separated by colons. One or more consecutive groups of zeros can be collapsed into :: once per address (in the example above, :: replaces several zero groups in the middle) — this makes the already-long addresses somewhat more compact, but they still remain considerably harder for humans to remember than an IPv4 address.
Dual-stack operation
In practice, A and AAAA records often exist in parallel for the same domain (“dual-stack”). A client that supports IPv6 then usually automatically prefers the AAAA record (modern operating systems use a mechanism called “Happy Eyeballs” for this, which tries both connection paths quasi-in-parallel and takes the faster one), while older or pure IPv4 networks fall back to the A record. This allows a gradual switch to IPv6, without excluding existing IPv4 clients — a central reason why, despite the IPv4 address shortage foreseeable for decades and now arrived, both worlds have had to run in parallel for years, and in some cases still do.
Why the switch is taking so long
IPv6 was already standardised in 1998, but its actual adoption remained low for decades — a classic chicken-and-egg problem: internet providers had little incentive to roll out IPv6, as long as hardly any websites offered it, and website operators saw little urgency, as long as hardly any users had it. Only the growing scarcity of IPv4 (free IPv4 address blocks at the regional internet registries are now practically exhausted) and the growing demand for addresses from IoT devices have increased the pressure. Today, a considerable but still not complete share of global traffic supports IPv6 natively — dual-stack therefore remains the default configuration for practically every publicly reachable website for the foreseeable future.
Fallback behaviour
If the AAAA record is completely missing, an IPv6-capable client automatically tries the A record over IPv4 — this costs a minimal amount of time (an additional failed connection attempt over IPv6, before falling back to IPv4), but isn’t a hard error. Conversely: if only an AAAA record exists with no A record, the domain simply isn’t reachable for pure IPv4 clients (still common, especially in older corporate networks or certain countries) — one reason pure IPv6-only hosting for public websites remains rare in practice.
See also: A Record, DNS Records, IPv6