DNS Servers: an Introduction to DNS Server Management

A Whitepaper by Geary Interactive

The domain name system (DNS) is the foundation of the modern web and is responsible for allowing all of the internet's users to easily assign meaningful names to websites and servers. DNS sounds like intimidating tech jargon, but it's actually more straightforward than other technologies. This whitepaper will explain DNS management in a digestible way and how its proper maintenance can positively affect your business.

The DNS system, on its simplest level, is similar to an extensive network of phone books for the web. A phone book consists of business or people's names which are directly associated to a phone number and possibly an address. DNS is basically the same thing.

Someone who wants to contact you would look in the phone book for the name "John Doe" and once they find it, they would contact you using the associated phone number. The same process is completed by a computer to lookup and display the webpage associated with the domain name you enter into a web browser. The difference is that instead of a phone number a computer returns an IP address.

An IP address is a numerical identification and logical address that is assigned to devices participating in a computer network (Wikipedia). The information returned from the DNS server for a requested domain is the IP address of where the website is hosted. It is also necessary to note that in the above example the record type is designated as "A" which corresponds to an IP address. There are other host record types like CNAME and URL REDIRECT which have their own specific purposes.

Now that we have identified the process of using a DNS server to determine where a computer needs to go to display a requested webpage, we can explore practical usage of DNS.

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