What is Domain Name System? | How Work DNS? | CodeTextPro

How work DNS?

DNS(Domain Name System)

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical decentralized naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. DNS is a protocol within the set of standards for how computers exchange data on the Internet and on many private networks, known as the TCP/IP protocol suite. Its basic job is to turn a user-friendly domain name like "abc.com" into an Internet Protocol (IP) address like 70.42.251.42 that computers use to identify each other on the network. It's like your computer's GPS for the Internet.

Computers and other network devices on the Internet use an IP address to route the request to the site we're trying to reach. This is similar to dialing a phone number to connect to the person we're trying to call. Just connect through a domain name server, also called a DNS server or name server, which

manages a massive database that maps domain names to IP addresses.

A DNS server is a computer server that contains a database of public IP addresses and their associated hostnames, and in most cases, serves to resolve, or translate, those common names to IP addresses as requested.

DNS servers run special software and communicate with each other using special protocols.

In easier to understand terms: a DNS server on the internet is the device that translates that www.lifewire.com you type in your browser to the 151.101.129.121 IP address that it really is.




Why Do We Have DNS Servers?

This question can be answered with another question: Is it easier to remember 151.101.129.121 or www.lifewire.com? Most of us would say it's much simpler to remember a word like lifewire instead of a string of numbers.

When we enter www.lifewire.com into a web browser, all we have to understand and remember is the URL http://www.lifewire.com. The same is true for any other website like Google.com, Amazon.com, etc.

The opposite is true too, that while we as humans can understand the words in the URL much easier than the IP address numbers, other computers and network devices understand the IP address.

Therefore, we have DNS servers because we not only want to use human-readable names to access websites, but the computers need to use IP addresses to access websites. The DNS server is that translator between the hostname and IP address.