What is DNS?
Domain Name System (DNS) converts human-readable domain names like www.yourdomainname.com into an Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses like 123.456.78.90. DNS maintains a directory of domain names and translates them into Internet Protocol (IP) Address. Converting domain names into IP Address help computers or machines to access websites while domain names help people to remember.
When you type in a web address for example- www.yourdomain.com, your ISP (Internet Services Provider) views the DNS associated with the domain name, translate that into the IP address and hence directs your internet connection to the associated website. The information related to all the domain name servers across the internet are summed up and registered at the central registry. All web hosting companies and ISPs interact with this central registry on a regular interval and hence gets updated DNS information. Now let us learn how does it work.
How Does It Work
When you register a new domain or update your DNS servers on your domain name, it usually takes about 12-36 hours for the domain name servers worldwide to be updated and able to access the information. This 30 hour period is called as propagation.
The process of DNS resolution involves translating a hostname into a computer-friendly IP address. When a user requests for a web page to load, the translation must occur between the domain name that user is seeking and the machine-readable IP Address formation to locate the requested domain name or website. As we know the central repository stores all the domain name related information, all this information is stored in Nameserver. These nameservers are called the root nameservers, and instead of storing all the domain and related data they only store the TLD (Top level domains). TLDs are the two or three characters like .com,.biz,.net and many more. Each TLDs has their own set of nameservers that are authoritative nameservers which store the information of DNS records for that domain. Hence the requested web page or the domain like www.yourdomain.com is displayed by fetching the corresponding IP Address.
The process mentioned above was the process to map the domain name to find the IP address and respond to the requested web page. Though it seems cumbersome, this whole process takes only a few milliseconds.
