If you have an Internet connection–and I imagine most people reading this do–then you may have encountered the acronym “DNS” before. Most of the time, DNS works quietly in the background so chances are you won’t have to worry about it. Since you’ve probably seen this mysterious acronym here and there, a quick explanation seems to be in order.
DNS stands for Domain Name System. A domain, or domain name, is the human-readable address by which you access websites. For instance, firstbytes.com is a domain name. Domain names are meant to be easy for humans to read and understand–and remember–making it relatively easy for people to find a particular website.
While domain names make it easy for humans to find websites, they don’t help computers much. All computers connected to the internet are assigned an IP address, such as 67.205.34.43. These addresses are what computers on the Internet actually use to communicate with each other. It’s a lot like dialing a telephone number to call a person, really. The name is easier to remember, but the phone system needs you to use a number.
The Domain Name System is like an automatic phone book–you type in the words, the DNS server translates, “OK, what she really means is this IP address“–and, so long as all the parts are communicating well, you are on your way to the website you requested without having to remember some crazy string of numbers.
There’s quite a bit more to it than this, such as how DNS is organized and precisely how it functions, but these are topics for a more in-depth article.