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Understanding DNS

Posted on November 1st, 2017

What is DNS?

 

The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most important components of the internet. Without it, finding a website would be very difficult. 

 

Every device that is connected to the internet (Web Servers, Mail Servers, Etc) needs to have a unique identifier so that when someone tries to view the website or send an email it has somewhere to connect to. These identifiers are known as an IP Address and they look something like this:

 

172.217.25.142 

 

That IP Address is for one of the servers for google.com and you can actually visit the website by putting the IP address into the address bar for your browser. Rather than having to memorize the IP Address of every website you want to visit, it’s much easier to have a service that converts something easier to remember into IP Addresses and uses that to direct you to the website.

 

That’s where DNS comes in.

 

DNS allows for the translation of ‘Host Names’ into IP Addresses and vice versa. A Host Name is a much nicer, and easier to remember, way to name a site or server. It’s a lot easy to remember google.com than 172.217.25.142.

 

The DNS System provides two things:
– A way to organise “Host Names” using a common naming structure.
– The services and methods for making IP Addresses accessible across the internet.

 

Domain Naming Structure

 

You’ve probably seen a few different Domains before. Sites like google.com, wikipedia.org and gohosting.com.au