The Domain Name System: How It Works

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the backbone of the Internet. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to access websites or send email unless you memorized IP addresses. It’s kind of like a phone book for the Internet: it translates domain names into IP addresses so that networked devices can understand each other. In this article, we’ll explain how DNS works and why it’s important for understanding how the world wide web works.

What is the Domain Name System (DNS)?

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services and other resources connected to the Internet or a private network. The domain name system translates human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. In order to achieve this, it must maintain data about that mapping. This data is stored in a set of interrelated databases called zones.

The Domain Name System was created in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris, who also designed BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain).

How does the Domain Name System (DNS) work?

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the backbone of the Internet. It’s what translates domain names into IP addresses, and vice versa. In other words, it’s how you get to websites like this one: you type in a URL or click on a link, which causes your computer to request information from one or more DNS servers that can help translate that hostname into an IP address (like “www2.website-name-here”).

The main purpose of DNS servers is to resolve domain names into IP addresses so that any given piece of information stored on multiple computers throughout the world can be accessed without having to remember which computer has what data stored on it (and without having all those different pieces of data stored in one place).

How are domain names registered?

The Domain Name …

A Beginner’s Guide To The Domain Name System (DNS)

The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most important elements of the internet, but it’s also one of the most complex. Understanding how DNS works not only helps you get around in your browser, but also empowers you to better understand and troubleshoot websites that run on servers. With this beginner’s guide to DNS, I’ll introduce you to everything from basic concepts like domain names and domain name servers to advanced topics like name records and record types. We’ll cover authoritative vs. recursive name servers; how they work together; what changes when a domain is transferred; why some sites give you bad results when they’re not responding properly; plus much more!

The domain name system, or DNS, is a system of computers that translates human-readable website names into machine-readable IP addresses. In other words, when you type “google.com” into your browser’s address bar and press Enter, the DNS servers translate that text into an IP address for Google’s servers to receive your request.

Google has many servers scattered around the world which store copies of its website and serve them up when people visit them from different locations (this is known as geo-distributed content). By using DNS lookup services like OpenDNS or Cloudflare’s free 1.1.1dot1dot1dot1tld service we can see how those servers are distributed across different regions:

DNS Basics

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical system of name servers that translates human-friendly domain names into IP addresses. It is a distributed database, relying on its users to maintain it and keep it accurate. DNS uses UDP on port 53 for communications between client and server, and TCP on port 53 for zone transfers between primary and secondary servers.

It’s important to note that DNS is not an application layer protocol; rather, it’s an application layer service …