Domain Name System

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the primary name translation system in use on the public Internet. Properly speaking, DNS refers to two distinct, closely related concepts. The first is the DNS protocol, which is used to translate human-readable names into the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for specific network hosts. The addresses are then used by the network for data transmission to the desired host. This process is called resolution and is often considered functionally similar to a conventional phone book. The second refers to a specific implementation of the DNS protocol, which is acknowledged by the vast majority of the Internet as the authoritative DNS implementation and is used by most Internet hosts worldwide. This major, worldwide implementation of DNS is overseen by the ...