Celebrating 31 Years Of The Domain Name System (DNS) This Month!

November 1984, RFC882 and RFC883 were launched, introducing the world to DNS.

DNS is a crucial part of the Internet

Infrastructure – it plays a role in ALL

DNS lookups. Without DNS, there

would be no Internet, so we are happy

to announce its birthday today!

A Bit of History…Twenty years ago, two computer scientists

at the University of Southern California created a

key component essential to the modern Internet.

Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris ran the first

successful test of the automated domain name system, or DNS,

which allows computers to find each other on the network and send information

back and forth to each other without having humans manually look up the

addresses of each machine.

The concept sounds simple now, but it was revolutionary 20 years ago.

As the predecessor of the Internet,

ARPANET, grew larger, connecting to

remote machines by their IP Address grew

cumbersome. It became more and more

difficult for people to remember the IP

Addresses associated with the machines

they were trying to reach that a system

was created to translate easier to

remember symbolic names to their

equivalent numerical IP Address. Thus the

Domain Name System was born.

What is DNS?

A key component of the Internet and how it works revolves around the Domain

Name System, otherwise known as DNS. The underlying technology behind the

Internet, is that when a computer needs to talk to another computer on the

Internet, they communicate via the computer's IP Address. The IP Address is a

unique set of numbers associated with a particular machine.

An example of an IP Address is 216.239.51.99, which is the IP Address

that corresponds to www.google.com.

.com = 216.239.51.99www.

Real Life Example…How DNS Works

You open up a web browser and

Try to connect to www.google.com.

Your Operating System, not

Knowing the IP Address, asks

Your ISP’s DNS Server for the

IP Address for www.google.com.

Your ISP’s DNS Server, if it does not know the IP

Address, connects to a Root Server and asks the

Root Server for the appropriate Name Server to

query which knows information about Google.com.

ISP PROVIDER ROOT SERVER

The Root Server tells your ISP’s DNS Server the

appropriate DNS Server to contact for information

about Google.com.

ISP PROVIDERROOT SERVER

The ISP’s DNS Server connects to Google’s DNS

server and asks for the IP Address for

www.google.com.

DNS SERVER

ISP PROVIDER

Google’s DNS Server responds to the ISP’s DNS

Server with the appropriate IP Address =

216.239.51.99

DNS SERVERISP PROVIDER

The ISP’s DNS Server tells your Operating System

the IP Address for google.com.

Your Operating SystemISP PROVIDER

Your Operating System tells the Web

Browser the IP Address for

www.google.com. The web browser

connects and starts communication with

www.google.com

Web Browser

Your Operating System

Conclusion

As you can see, the Domain Name System is essential in the use of the

Internet. For any company that leverages the Internet for sales, marketing or

information, business continuity depends on 100% site availability and fast

loading times. Everything on the Internet relies on DNS: web, email, video,

audio, and more. This means, no matter how fast your Internet connection

speed is, a site won’t load unless the DNS server has performed the lookup

successfully. Unreliable and poor performing DNS directly affects your Internet

presence – and speed.

Why Outsource DNS?

Here at DNS Made Easy, DNS is our

lifeblood. It's what we do. We are experts

In DNS. All of DNS Made Easy systems

Are located at premium data facilities with

Multiple data providers. From a network standpoint DNS Made Easy is in the

top tier of DNS providers worldwide. We have a historical

8-year 100% uptime and an overall 99.9999% uptime history due to our

5th generation network, and continue to make significant improvements to

redundancy and capacity to make sure we keep it that way.