A Domain Name System or Domain Name Service (DNS) is a network protocol whose job is to map domain names such as “gohacking.com” to its corresponding IP address like“104.28.6.51”.

 

Since Internet is the mother of millions of computers each having a unique IP address, it becomes impossible for people to remember the IP address of each and every computer they want to access so, in order to make this process simpler the concept of domain names was introduced. As a result users can easily access any website just by typing their domain names in the browser’s address bas such as “google.com” or “yahoo.com” without having to remember their actual IP addresses.

 

However, since the network protocol understands only the IP address and not the domain names, it is necessary to translate the domain name back to its corresponding IP address before establishing a connection with the target server. This is where DNS comes in handy.

 

Your Internet Service Provider has a DNS server which maintains a huge record of existing domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. Each time you type the URL such as “http://www.google.com” on your browser’s address bar, your computer will use the DNS server from the ISP and translates the domain name “google.com” to its corresponding IP address to make a connection with the Google’s server. All this process will happen in a split second behind the scenes and hence goes unnoticed.