Welcome back to another installment of Ready Artwork’s Web Wednesday!

Today, we’d like to talk about Domain Name System, or DNS, which picks up from last week’s discussion of domain names.

The Domain Name System is the protocol for how computers and other network devices exchange data on the Internet to translate user-friendly domain names, like www.ReadyArtwork.com, into the Internet Protocol addresses (174.37.192.9) that computers use to identify each other.

An Internet Service Provider’s DNS would store this information in its system, just like an address book. For example:

• readyartwork.com – 174.37.192.9
• google.com – 74.125.224.167
• yahoo.com – 72.30.38.140
• facebook.com – 66.220.149.11

As we discussed last week, domain names make it easy for us to remember how to find a specific website.  When you type “readyartwork.com” into your internet browser, the ISP will immediately go to its DNS to find an entry with the listed IP Address that will tell your computer where to go.  If your ISP’s DNS does not have that information, it will ask another DNS for the address.

Otherwise, you will be met with an error page, like so:

But with so many DNS in the world, each must continually update their information.

Let’s say you have a brand new iPhone4S and you want to start using it (but you don’t have contacts! Oh No!). You would first sync your contacts via the iCloud to get your contacts, where you would also be able to find your missing Google Contacts phone numbers, so you go ahead and sync that up, too.

However, you also have some contacts from your Outlook on a PC somewhere and the only way to sync these contacts up is to export a file onto a floppy disk (’cause that’s how you roll) and plug it into your MBP (somehow) and sync it via iTunes (because you don’t want these guys onto your iCloud.). Now you finally have all your contacts in your Address Book.

But what if you updated a new contact on your Outlook?

What then?

Well, you would have to go through the same process again, which would take forever.

This is, in a much less technical terms, similar to how DNS works. If you want a brand new domain to be pointing to your server’s IP address, you have to update your DNS. This update will take a good while since it must tell the world about your new IP Address (the world here would be the iPhone 4s of the previous paragraph).

In short, the Domain Name Server is what helps us navigate the internet, quickly and efficiently.

Thanks for stopping by! We hope you learned a thing or two!