[Term of the Day]: DNS
Term of the Day
“Domain Name Server”
Definition — What is DNS and what it does?
Ever wondered how when you visit a domain or full web address in a browser, www.amazon.com for instance, the site gets loaded?
Here comes the sophisticated technology "Domain Name System" that translates human readable domain names to machine readable IP addresses (for example, 192.0.9.54).
DNS is often likened to the internet’s version of a telephone book. If you know a person’s name but don’t know their telephone number, you can simply look it up in a phone book. DNS provides this same service to the internet.
DNS underpins the internet we use every day as connects URLs with their IP address which makes our life easy.
How does it work?
As we already know that DNS maps IP addresses to domain names, but where is this information stored? On nameservers!
Nameservers store DNS records which are the actual file that says “this domain” maps to “this IP address” and these are distributed all around the world. These nameservers are called the root nameservers and instead of storing every domain ever, they store the locations of the TLD (top level domains).
TLD’s are the two or three characters like .com that end a domain name. Each TLD has its own set of nameservers that store the information that says who is authoritative for storing the DNS records for that domain.
The authoritative nameserver is typically the DNS provider or the DNS registrar like GoDaddy, Domain.com and so on. Here we can find the DNS record that maps example.com to the IP address 127.33.102.13.