What exactly is DNS provider, and how does it work?
In: 2
DNS is the service that converts names like “www.reddit.com” to its IP address, like 192.0.2.47
There are two different definitions of a “DNS provider”. First is the service that does what I just described above. Every ISP provides their customers with a DNS provider – typically themselves – but 3rd party providers exist. Examples include google, opendns, and cloudflare. Normally I would just stick to your ISP’s unless you suspect they’re up to something nefarious, or they perform poorly.
The second type is used by hosting companies. If you actually owned reddit.com, you need DNS servers so that the world can request the IP addresses for www.reddit.com from you. You could host your own DNS servers, but you could also pay another company to provide that service to you. It’s recommended that you have 2+ DNS servers geographically diverse so that they’re unlikely to both be dead at the same time for any reason, so paying someone to be at least 1 of the 2+ often makes sense.
Latest Answers