How Do Domain Name Servers Work?
Going behind the scenes of your domain name.
If you’re anything like me, you tread the line between technology nutter, lover of all things digital, and a sweet old man you can’t help but love for still using his rotary landline telephone. You may be versed in the lingo of social media and be able to throw out a few techy terms, but when it comes to any real in-depth tech you are happy to leave it to the real tech pros.
One such topic you might have decided was better left untouched was that of the domain name server, or DNS. Perhaps you’ve noticed it pop up amidst a jumble of letters and numbers at the bottom of your web browser while you wait for your streaming movie to buffer, or maybe you have come across it when scanning your at-home Wi-Fi contract, looking out for ways those telecom execs were trying to take advantage of you (and then promptly moving right along when you didn’t know what it meant).
DNS is not a techy term to be feared, but rather one of the simplest things on the internet to understand. Put on your art class hat (you know, the one you used to don when you got to piece together dried pasta noodles into some semblance of a recognisable shape and glue it to a piece of paper, cover it with glitter paint, then hang it in the school hallway, all while employing minimal effort to understand what the heck it was you were actually creating but nonetheless getting a satisfying A from your teacher for your work of art) and let me tell you the basic 1, 2, 3 about how domain name servers work.
To understand domain name servers, we first need to understand a universal rule: computers don’t speak English (or any other language for that matter). Computers communicate with each other in numbers. When we type a website address into a web browser and hit Enter, a little bit of digi magic goes on behind the scenes and the web browser translates that web address into a series of numbers. That set of numbers is known as an Internet Protocol address, better know as an IP address. An IP address is basically the name for each individual computer, and no two computers have the same name.
After the web browser translates a domain name into an IP address, it now knows where you want to go, but it needs to find out how to get there. That’s where the domain name server comes in: your web browser shoots the IP address to a domain name server and says, “Hey, DNS, do you know where to find this place?” If the DNS server has the directions to that place in its library, it zips them to your web browser and your web browser goes to that location to collect all the text, images, and links from the website and assembles for you in the form of a nice, beautiful web page.
Sometimes the DNS that you ask for directions doesn’t have those directions. When that happens, it just asks other domain name servers if they know how to get to the spot. Once it finds a DNS that knows the route, it gets the directions back to your web browser, then also saves a copy of the directions for itself in what’s known as a cache, just in case you need those directions again soon. All this happens in milliseconds.
And that’s it! You now know a little smidgen of what goes on behind the scenes in your web browser.
Find the right domain name for you over on our domain name registration page.