Did you come across the acronym DNS while surfing the Internet and you have no idea what it means?

Complete your technical knowledge and look at a simple explanation. Find out why this acronym is so important to the Internet.

From numbers to a domain

DNS stands for Domain Name System and is a protocol that translates website domain names from the cluttered (numerical) form used by the machine to a so-called "domain name" - the name you see in your browser and enter when you want to enter the page.

If you want to get a picture of how this whole process works, you can compare it to a phonebook on a mobile phone. Remembering phone numbers is certainly more difficult than remembering the names of the people you want to call. Therefore, you can search the list by name. However, the phone then dials a specific number.

DNS works very similarly in layman's terms. The task of the DNS server is to find out the numeric address (IP address) that is hidden under this name according to the domain name entered by the user and to "dial" it. This will take you to the desired page.

Hierarchy in the world of DNS

IP addresses are expressed in two ways. Older 32-bit notation (IPv4) contains dot-separated numbers (11.111.11.111). The newer IPv6 notation consists of a combination of numbers and letters separated by colons.

However, finding and assigning the correct IP address is not nearly as easy for the DNS protocol as it is for assigning a name to a number in the phone book. The DNS system works hierarchically and can be imagined as a tree. During the transfer, the protocol starts with 13 so-called root servers from the world, from which the nearest one can choose. It then proceeds from this server to the lower-order servers until it obtains an exact response - that is, an IP address.

Buffering DNS server

To speed up the whole process, special DNS buffer servers have been created. These are available from your ISP or your modem. The IP addresses of the visited pages are stored here, and therefore the protocol first queries this buffer server.

DNS solves much more

When the DNS protocol was created in 1983, it was intended only for the above-mentioned purpose. That is, for translating website IP addresses into domain names. Later, however, he was assigned other functions. These apply to e-mail, for example. Currently, DNS servers serve as a specific database of network information.