5 minutes to understand — DNS resolution of domain names

Human beings have a very bad mem­o­ry for num­ber sequences. How­ev­er, com­put­ers and servers com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er by iden­ti­fy­ing them­selves through an IP address, which is a sequence of num­bers or a mix of num­bers that is very com­plex to mem­o­rize and dif­fer­en­ti­ate.

To help peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate over net­works, the Domain Names Sys­tem (DNS) was invent­ed. This ser­vice is a giant Inter­net direc­to­ry, hier­ar­chi­cal and dis­trib­uted world­wide, which asso­ciates domain names with IP address­es.

When a web user enters a domain name in his brows­er, it queries a DNS serv­er which will look for the answer to this human­ly under­stand­able address, most often an IP address, lead­ing to the right web­site, com­put­er or net­work. This query process is called “DNS res­o­lu­tion”.

Find in this “5 min­utes to under­stand” doc­u­ment, how the DNS res­o­lu­tion works.

By val­i­dat­ing this form you will have access to the down­load of the doc­u­ment 5 min­utes to under­stand: DNS res­o­lu­tion of domain names.