DNS: A Beginner’s Guide to How Your Website Is Reached

Your web designer and/or developer will throw around a lot of acronyms. One of the most important is DNS. DNS, or “domain name system” is a fundamental part of the internet, hence an important part of any web site project.

The simplest way to understand DNS is to think of a mid century office switchboard. At the center of the office building is a room full of operators. When a call comes in, the operator uses a switchboard to route the call to the correct phone in the office of the other party.

If the other party were to move to another office, perhaps on another floor, the operator and switchboard would be need to be updated so that new calls would be routed correctly.

DNS operates very similarly. Once a domain is registered, the owner must point the record to a DNS server. Much like the operator and switchboard, the owner of the domain must configure the name server to point internet traffic to the correct servers, much like phone calls to an office.

Common destinations include MX records for email delivery, A-NAME records for www and the main domain, and can include C-NAME records for address such as mail.domain.com and other URLs.

If a server needs to be moved or replaced, the name server must be updated to direct traffic to the new location, or else traffic will result in an error.

Launching your website will require updating these DNS entries with your web host, whether you host your site yourself or have outside hosting.