Did you know that you use the DNS system every day? You use it even if you are not familiar with how networks work. And even if you’re wasting your precious time on your mobile phone… But what is DNS and how does it work? Here’s a clear answer.
The DNS system is one of the foundations of the internet. Without it, there would be no domains, and therefore, no web addresses. When you type the address of your favorite news portal or website into your web browser, it’s DNS that gives your browser the content you expect.
DNS as a telephone directory
When the internet was very small, users used IP addresses to reach each other’s computers. However, it very quickly became clear that this was unsustainable. Number sequences such as 172.217.20.14, or rather a multitude of them, are impossible to remember. That’s when the idea of phonebook-style sorting was born. In this way, computers and other online devices connected to the Internet could be sorted textually and semantically.
The DNS system: the database of names and numbers
The DNS system is a huge database of names and numbers. For example, the domain name google.com is associated with the IP address 172.217.20.14. This means that if you type google.com into your browser, you can access the details of the machine at IP address 172.217.20.14.
However, don’t think that this database can be found in one place, in some dark corner of the internet. Like the Internet network, the DNS system is a distributed network. There is not a single DNS database, but many many DNS servers around the world, all able to communicate with each other. According to statistics so far in 2018, there have been 340 million domain registrations so far! It would not be reasonable to store such a large database of domain names in one place…
DNS system speed
The distribution of the DNS system is also important to make it faster to query and find domain names. This way, the DNS server closest to your computer or mobile phone can tell you from which machine the content of the requested website address should be retrieved and delivered to you. DNS servers have been able to increase this speed further by using so-called caching. This means that the availability of a web page that has already been queried by someone else is stored for a certain period of time by the DNS server closest to you. This saves you the time of repeated queries and makes half of your request for the website served to you lightning fast. In other words, it will direct your browser to the right place at lightning speed.
