- What is DNS and why is it
important?
If you spend any time
on the Internet sending
e-mail or browsing the
Web, then you use domain
name servers without even realizing it. Domain
name servers, or DNS, are an incredibly important but completely
hidden part of the
Internet. The DNS
system forms one of the largest and most active distributed
databases on the planet. Without DNS, the Internet would shut
down very quickly.
When you use the Web
or send an e-mail message, you use a
domain name to
do it. For example, the URL "http://www.maxiis.com" contains the
domain name maxiis.com.
So does the e-mail address "maxiis@maxiis.com."
Human-readable names
like "maxiis.com" are easy for people to remember, but they
don't do machines any good. All of the machines use something
called IP addresses
to refer to one another. For example, the web site that humans
refer to as "www.maxiis.com" has the IP address
12.2.232.70.
Every time you use a
domain name, you use the Internet's domain name servers (DNS) to
translate the human-readable domain name into the
machine-readable IP address. During a day of browsing and
e-mailing, you might access the domain name servers hundreds of
times!
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