Video: What is DNS?

What is DNS and why is it important for getting your website to function properly? We sat down with Name.com Customer Support Rep Andrew to answer all of our questions.

Video transcript:

Title tag: The Nerd Compass, Directions for the Internet from Name.com

Andrew: DNS is this big scary thing and this traffic that people don’t quite get how it works.

Screen text: Learn the DNS (Domain Name System)

Andrew: When all terms like nameservers, DNS, A records, CNAME are all thrown at you, it is very daunting to deal with it at first.

Screen text: URL Forwarding: An example of DNS

Andrew: The URL forwarding we use connects to IP addresses that go to a server that says, “change destination to: input new destination.” To relate it to something people understand—because we talk about internet traffic—let’s say there’s a party at Jared’s house. So Jared’s house would be the domain. The actual house itself would be the website. So the DNS is going to be what leads the domain to that website. Nameservers would be like the GPS that serves you the directions to Jared’s house. The DNS records themselves are the actual directions, turn left here, turn right here.

Andrew: Then you have different types of those records which serve different purposes, like MX records tell you where the mailbox is, versus the house.

So simplifying it down to traffic point A, point B is good for beginners, and then you start getting into “fun things” like TXT and SRB records, which can serve tons of different purposes such as verification. Google will use those a lot to allow you to create an email account on the business level. SRB records are used by Microsoft in place of MX records to do very complicated exchange work. And you can have [records] that loop around and perform several actions using multiple records to create load balancing in very complex environments very quickly with very small amounts of information.

Check out more videos on Name.com’s YouTube channel.