What exactly is DNS provider, and how does it work?
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Computers do not speak english, or any human language.
What we (humans) think of as an internet address, is actually not. www.reddit.com is just a word it’s not an address. www.reddit.com is known as a domain name, but actual internet addresses normally look like groups of numbers.
Where I live, reddit.com is actually hosted on a computer at the address 155.101.1.140 (among a few others). But no human could ever remember an address like that, it’s insane. Imagine the following conversation..
“Did you hear about that cool news story? A man was eaten by a bear!”
“OMG no, where did you read that?”
“I read it on 155.101.1.140”
That would never happen. Humans do a much better job of remembering words rather than long groups of numbers. So instead this happens
“Did you hear about that cool news story? A man was eaten by a bear!”
“OMG no, where did you read that?”
“I read it on reddit.com”
So computers use one kind of address and humans use a different one.
A DNS provider is what translates between these kinds of addresses. It’s just like a long list of domain names and the actual addresses associated with them.
So when you type in www.reddit.com your computer goes, “Oh, this is a human address, I shal contact my DNS provider and ask them to look this up for me.” It then contacts the DNS provider and says “Please look up www.reddit.com and tell me the address.” The DNS provider replies “the address is 155.101.1.140”.
Your computer then goes to 155.101.1.140 and requests it’s webpage. That webpage is reddit and it loads reddit and shows it to you.
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