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You may not know it, but domain names aren’t actually necessary to get to a website. You can also access websites by their corresponding IP address. An IP address is a 32-bit identification number that corresponds to the machine that the website is actually on. For people, however, an IP address in a series of 4 octets isn’t easy to remember at all. That’s why domain names were invented. Remembering a domain name is far easier for accessing a website, so much so that most people probably don’t know there’s any other way of finding them.

A special computer that stores data is called a domain name server. You may have seen its abbreviation: DNS. The DNS is necessary for domain names to work properly.

The DNS knows the website names and the IP addresses that correspond to them. The technique by which DNSs do this is called “reverse mapping.” When a domain name is typed in, the DNS looks up its numerical IP address in a directory service. The DNS will also correspond with other DNSs to see if they know the IP address. Since no official database is responsible for updating information on other domain servers, the data are distributed among many.

You can turn a computer into a DNS by having it run DNS software. The DNS software encountered most is Berkeley Internet Name Domain, or BIND, which works in a hierarchical manner. The first thing in the hierarchy is “.” or a dot. This is known as the system’s root. Underneath the root in the hierarchy are the familiar domain extensions like .com, .net, .biz, or .org.

A DNS can’t do it all by itself. It has to have client computers to help with its operation. The client computers are known as resolvers and nameservers. Resolvers store a list of all other nameservers on the Internet. It is used to contact those nameservers if a domain name’s IP isn’t stored in the initial DNS. Nameservers are the machines responsible for locating a particular domain name’s IP address.

Whether a web hosting provider should invest in a domain name server is debatable. Smaller web hosting outfits may not reap enough from its investment in a DNS to make it worthwhile. But if a company wants to be a large, well-known hosting provider like Yahoo or GoDaddy, then a DNS could be a worthwhile investment. A company wanting to buy a DNS can get them from the vendors that sell regular web servers.

The domain name server, or DNS, is considered to be the center of domain name operations. If there weren’t domain name servers, then domains wouldn’t be associated with IP addresses. The IP addresses are responsible for identifying computers on a computer network, but that doesn’t mean that web hosting providers should invest in a DNS. There are countless cheap domain name services that do the job just fine. If a web hosting provider buys a DNS, then they can sell domain names as well as website hosting.

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