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Why In The World Do We Need DNS?!!

The simplest way to explain domain name servers (DNS) is this: DNS translates domain names to IP addresses.

You see, humans have a hard time remembering a bunch of numbers for web sites like 216.183.103.150. We are much better at remembering names.







Human-readable names like website-hosting-advisor.com are easy for us to remember, but machines need internet protocol (IP) addresses to refer to one another.

If you spend anytime at all on the internet you are using DNS without ever realizing it. Whenever you type a domain name into your browser or send email you are using the DNS system. The DNS system forms one of the largest and most active databases in the world.


Computer IP Addresses

Each machine on the internet is assigned a unique IP address to keep everyone straight. A server will have what they call a static IP address, it does not change. A home machine, on the other hand, that connects to the internet through a modem will have a dynamic (changing) IP address assigned by the ISP.

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An IP address is all you need to talk to a server or other machine on the internet. Domain names are strictly a human convenience for surfing the net and hence the DNS system.

Servers on the internet do two things all day:
  1. They accept requests from programs to convert domain names into IP addresses.

  2. They accept requests from other servers to convert domain names into IP addresses.

When you type or click on a URL, the web browser then converts that domain name into a IP address. The browser then uses that IP address to request a web page from the machine that has that specific IP address.

It basically boils down to the browser is having a conversation with the DNS.


Creating A New Domain Name

When you or a business wants to create a domain name they have to do a couple of things:
  1. Find a server for the domain name to live on.

  2. Register the domain name.

There are two ways to get a server for a domain name.
  1. Create and administer it yourself.

  2. Pay a hosting company to handle it for you.

Usually larger companies have their own servers. Smaller companies pay someone. To create a domain name, one fills out a form with a company that does DNS registration.

This company then creates an "under construction page", puts an entry in their server, and submits the forms data into the whois database. Every day the .com, .org, .net, etc. servers get updates with the newest IP address information.

As you have read, DNS is an amazing distributed database. It handles billions of requests for billions of names every day. From sending email to viewing URL's, this amazing DNS process is invisible and extremely reliable.



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