The Little Black Book of Online Business: 1001 Insider Resources Every Business Owner Needs

Chapter 21. DNS Services

A domain name server (DNS) is like an electronic web site address book. When you register a domain (e.g., "xyz.com"), you point it to a name server. You then tell the name server what IP address your web site will be using.

This is not as complicated as it sounds and is usually done for you by your hosting company if you're using a shared server, or from your web hosting manager if you're on a dedicated server.

Your name server then tells the rest of the known universe that it will be handling requests for your domain, and it also tells them what IP address has been assigned to that domain.

After that, when someone enters your web address in their browser location bar, here's what happens: The browser sends a query to your Internet service provider's name server asking, "Where can I find the xyz.com domain?" The name server replies with the IP address that your name server last broadcast.

Your browser then makes a connection to that IP address and requests the page the user has specified.

Your web server returns that page to your browser.

That's probably way more than you wanted to know about DNS (and that is a very simplified explanation), but I've thrown it in here for those who may be curious about the technology involved.

Anyway, you can see that your name server is a critical component of the web infrastructure—if your name server goes down, nobody will know where to find your web site. So, if you want to make extra sure your web site is accessible, ...