Dns Hosting
DNS Propagation Explained
Free Dns Hosting
Is your new Web Host Provider a lemon? DNS Hosting stands for Domain Name Server. Your beloved computer can be a server too. With the language barier lowered, I will tell you that DNS can be tricky, especially when first registering a domain name or transferring your website to a web hosting provider.
IP Addresses
Our computers talk to each other by identifying themselves using numerical addresses much like the address on your home or for your telephone. When one computer wants to speak to another computer, it all boils down to an address or what we call an “IP Address”. Here is an example: 64.247.43.26
Service Providers
The ISP (or Internet Service Provider) is the company that provides you with access to the internet. This IP address will be used to identify your computer while you are connected to the internet. The WHP has already assigned this server one of their IP addresses. You then open up your web browser and type in your website’s domain name: yourdomain.com. The server then responds by sending a copy of the website’s home page back to your computer because it knows the IP address of the computer that made the request.
A domain name is what you typically enter into your web browser when you want to visit a website. Website: www.yourdomain.com / Email: user@yourdomain.com .The mechanism that translates numbers into names (that is, IP addresses into domain names) and vice versa.
Domain Name Registrar
If you want to have your own domain name you will need to register one through a company called a Domain Name Registrar.
DNS
DNS is a software program that runs on a dedicated computer known as a DNS server. DNS serves two primary functions:
- To translate domain names into IP addresses.
DNS servers make translating or “Resolving” this information fast and seamless. When your computer needs to know the IP address for yourdomain.com it asks a DNS server (usually the one provided by your ISP).
- To act as authority for designated domain names.
Wherever you decide to host your website, the network you are on must have its own DNS servers. Some DNS servers strictly store names while others are doing the work of providing lookup services for computers that need to look up names. Many DNS servers do both. Technically, the server that is responsible for a particular domain is called the “Authority”. There are a few pieces of crucial information stored in a DNS server with regard to your domain name. For the purposes of not altering your sanity, in this article I will focus only on the domain name, the ‘A’ record (or your WHP’s DNS servers).
The Propagation Process
As I said before, your domain registrar is the one responsible for publishing your domain name at the very first (called root) DNS level. The primary DNS servers broadcast out to secondary DNS servers and so on and so forth.
Propagation refers to the amount of time it takes for all the DNS servers everywhere around the world to recognize the fact that either a new domain is being registered, a domain name has been changed, or that the authority for that domain has changed.
DNS servers are always updating themselves and changing dynamically during the course of any given day. Think about the load-balancing DNS servers again. One server has information about your OLD WHP and the other has information about your NEW WHP! - by Andrei Smith
