DNS Servers - Names & Numbers

How would a person send a message to the President of the United States? One could try simply sending a letter to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington D.C. 20500. But, is this the correct street address? Zip code? Answering these questions can be at the least, cumbersome, and at the worst – downright difficult. Life would be much easier, if one could just write on their letter: “White House” and have it be properly delivered. On the internet, this is possible, using the Domain Name System or DNS.

Like a business, a home, or an apartment, internet sites also have addresses, called I.P. Addresses. These addresses can be quite long and have proven extremely difficult for human beings to readily recall. With the creation of DNS, a person looking for Google just has to point their web browser to Google.com, rather than to the seemingly mysterious 72.14.213.106 to be afforded the opportunity to search Google's wealth of knowledge for whatever their heart desires.

Thinking about how DNS actually works, one could conceptualize a hierarchical network of computers, called “Name Servers” that share information about which domain name resolves to which I.P. Address. These name servers are run by hosting providers, such as EnderTech, and distributed geographically across the globe to serve the multitudes of requests made each and every second.