Most people using the internet today aren’t really concern about how things work inside the web. They use the internet every day but only a few know what really is going on and how things work internally. Among the terms which you would want to know is the domain name system or DNS. People basically use it every day on their job by checking their email or merely killing their time on their smartphones.
Let’s Get to Know DNS
In the simplest form, DNS is a directory of names that match with numbers. But what are these numbers? Well, those are the IP addresses. It is what computers use to communicate with each other.
You can think of DNS as your smartphone’s contact list. It basically matches people’s names with their phone numbers and as well as email addresses. Then you can start multiplying that contact list by everyone else on the planet.
How DNS Servers Really Work
The DNS directory that matches a name to numbers isn’t located all in one place in some dark corner of the internet. Like the internet itself, the directory is distributed around the world, stored on domain name servers that all communicate with each other on a very regular basis to provide updates and redundancies.
DNS information is shared among many servers but is also cached locally on client computers. Chances are that you use google.com several times a day. Instead of your computer querying the DNS name server for the IP address of google.com every time, that information is saved on your computer so it doesn’t have to access a DNS server to resolve the name with its IP address. Additional caching can occur on the routers used to connect clients to the internet, as well as on the servers of the user’s Internet Service Provider (ISP). With so much caching going on, the number of queries that actually make it to DNS name servers is a lot lower than it would seem.
There you have it! DNS is not really complicated to know. It really plays a great role in the flow of the internet.
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