How does DNS work?

Cast your mind back to the 1980’s if you will. It was the decade of the Rubik’s cube, Michael Jackson’s Thriller album and crucially, the birth of the Domain Name System (DNS).

It’s 1983 and it would be another 7 years until the birth of the World Wide Web: the internet as we know it and DNS is a key part of making the internet accessible for everybody.

DNS is like a telephone directory. It allows us to provide meaning and context to what would otherwise be a meaningless set of numbers. Imagine accessing the Google search engine by typing 172.217.165.14 into your browser. I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s not very memorable. That number is an Internet Protocol (IP) address and it’s how your computer ‘speaks’ to Google.

So there it is. In its simplest form, DNS translates a human readable name such as Google.com into an IP address so that your computer can deal with the nasty details of accessing the website and returning your important search results.

There are a whole hierarchy of computers on the internet whose job is to find out where you need to get to when you type google.com into your web browser.

Here at thewebbroker.co we work with DNS every day. When you purchase a website from us, we manage the whole process of mapping your domain name to our web servers.

Drop us a line for more information.