Every time we open a website, we usually type a domain name into our browser rather than an IP address. For example, we type yahoo.com instead of remembering a numerical address such as 203.0.113.10 .

Computers communicate over networks using IP addresses, so how does a browser know which IP address belongs to a domain name?

The answer is DNS (Domain Name System) .

DNS is a distributed, hierarchical naming system that translates domain names into information computers can use to locate services on a network.

Think of DNS as the internet's phone-book, but it is more accurate to think of it as a distributed directory.

To understand how this works, let's follow what happens when someone enters yahoo.com into a browser.

1.…