DNS Basics: What It is and Why It Matters

Introduction

DNS, or the Domain Name System, works like the internet's global phonebook. When we search online, we use website names like google.com or facebook.com. However, our browser doesn't understand these names or can't locate the website using just the name.

But why? Because on the vast internet, you can't identify a website by just its name. It's like trying to find someone in the real world using only their name. We need extra information for that website, which should be unique, just like our Aadhar card, PAN card, or driving license.

That's why, on the internet, each device has a unique IP address. This address is used by other machines to find the device online, but these addresses are in numeric and alphanumeric formats. eg. 172.217.19.164 and 2001:4860:4860::8888

What is DNS?

DNS, or DNS servers, provide an easy-to-remember name for a website's IP address because humans can't easily memorize these addresses. It's similar to how we don't remember all the phone numbers we save in our contacts, we use names to quickly find a person's contact number.

How DNS Works exactly ?

Here is an image that explains how DNS works, step by step.

Some of the Jargon Words and Their Explanations :

Client: The one who sends the requests.

DNS Resolver: Finding a website's IP address using its name.

DNS Cache: The DNS stores the IP addresses of visited sites in temporary cache data.

Root Server: There are only 13 in the world, and they contain and store the references for TLD servers. They help determine which TLD server to look up, such as .com, .in, or .uk.

TLD Server: The Top Level Domain server stores the IP address of the authoritative nameserver that sold the domain name.

Authoritative Nameserver: Returns the IP address of the domain name requested by the client.

Thanks for reading. Have a great day! :)