Opus Interactive | If These Servers Could Talk

So How Does One Access The Internet… DNS of Course

Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 9:43 am by Steven Brenneman

One of the important tools in Web Hosting that sometimes gets overlooked is DNS, or Domain Name System. 

 

Without DNS, your computer would not know how to access the domain names you try to access on a daily basis.  DNS is used to translate computer hostnames to IP addresses so that computers can map information properly.  For instance, it is much easier to remember a hostname like www.google.com  rather than then its IP address of 209.85.171.104 when trying to go to Google’s website.

 

So, what happens in the time it takes between when you enter the URL into the address bar of your web browser and when the webpage appears?  I will explain in the following steps using Google as the example.

 

When you type www.google.com into your web browser, your computer searches to see if this is a registered domain, and if so obtains Name Server values from the Registrar where the domain is registered.

 

The Name Server values it finds at the registrar direct your computer to the proper Name Servers for www.google.com.

 

These Name Servers then provide an IP address of a web server that contains the website www.google.com.

 

Your computer then finds the information needed on this web server and displays that information on your computer monitor.

 

Without DNS your computer would not know what to make of the human-readable computer hostnames because everything on the Web is identified by an IP address.  So, in a way DNS serves as a “phone book” for the Internet by translating these easily remembered hostnames, like www.google.com, into IP addresses that networking equipment need for the proper delivery of information.

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