Welcome to dns-server.za.com a DNS Server designed by dns-server.za.com
and released 2025 Creative Commons Attribution license.
Every website is hosted on a server, and every server has an IP address. To open the required page, the browser must establish a connection with the IP address. This address is obtained via DNS. In this article, we will try to explain as clearly as possible what DNS is, what a DNS server is, what it is for, and how it all works..
DNS (Domain Name System) is a hierarchically distributed database. One of its functions is to connect the website domain names with the IP addresses of the servers where they’re located. Every website has an IP address. Two types of addresses are currently in use: IPv4—a four-byte address: four numbers ranging from 0 to 255. The format looks like this: 000.111.222.123. IPv6—a more modern type of IP, a 16-byte address. There are several formats to record IPv6 addresses. The most widespread one is 8 groups with 4 symbols in each (eight four-digit hexadecimal numbers), divided by colons, which might look like this: 1234:abcd:1b4d:000a:987c:5555:a2d8:bcd6. IP addresses are akin to phone numbers, and domain names are like the names of people who own these numbers. In turn, the Domain Name System is like the contacts search in our smartphones. When we want to open a web resource (for instance, gcore.com), we enter the domain name, the system then transposes it into an IP address, and then uses it to determine where to send the request. The request is sent to the required address, and the page opens in the browser..
If DNS is like the contacts search system in your smartphone, DNS servers are phonebooks with contact lists. They contain information about domains and specify who owns which IP address..
They have two main functions: Information storage—which IP address relates to the domain. Caching the entries from other servers. The first function is clear and simple: a DNS server has a list of names and addresses relating to them. It receives a query and sends back the required information. Caching is a bit more complicated. Most servers do not store the information about all the domain names and IP addresses on the web. Let’s imagine that a user from China wants to open a website, and the information about the IP of this website is stored at a DNS server in the US. If whenever this user clicks the link the browser sends the query to the United States, it will take a really long time for the page to load. So, the browser usually sends the query to the internet service provider’s servers, which are usually closer to the end user. The ISP’s server connects to the American server, obtains the resource address, and saves the data in its cache. The next time, when a Chinese user wants to open this web service, the DNS server operator will have the required IP at hand, and the page will open faster. This is what’s called caching. However, the cache is not stored on a server forever. The storage time mainly depends on the TTL parameter of the resource records (more about them below). To better figure out how it all works, let’s start by understanding the types of DNS servers out there..