Why Does debonne.net Host DNS Service? Because it can. How Does DNS Work? Think of domain names as cute little reminders for us humans to remember a web site's name or a person's e-mail address. Internet traffic is routed via a set of numbers, not names. Therefore every domain name has a unique number associated with it. These numbers are called IP addresses. The Domain Name Service (DNS) provides an alias for an Internet Protocol (IP) address. Computers on the Internet locate one another based on their IP addresses. While numbers are fine for computers, people can remember names better than numbers. People are more likely to remember the hostname www.debonne.net than the IP address 206.100.84.21. So DNS provides a name alias for a computer's IP address. A computer's name is therefore composed of two parts, the name and the domain. The name is the portion to the far left up to the first period (.), and the domain is the rest. So, the host www.debonne.net has a name of www and a domain of debonne.net. Computers on the Internet have a program called a "resolver". It is usually part of the Operating System. Its job is to "look-up" IP addresses when a user puts in a hostname. The resolver knows your Internet domain's name server (DNS server). This computer knows all the names and IPs for your domain. For example, if you work for the U.S. Postal Service, your resolver is configured to ask dns.usps.gov for IP addresses. If your local name server doesn't know the IP address, it contacts the root servers. (see picture below) There are 12 root servers on the Internet. They don't know IP addresses, but they know who does. For every top-level domain (such as .COM, .GOV, .US), the root servers know who are the responsible name servers. Those name servers, in turn, know who is responsible for the next level of domains. Confused? Lets walk through an example. Our local system is gate.debonne.net and we are looking for www.yahoo.com. We type www.yahoo.com into our web browser. The resolver checks our local system to see if we know the IP. We don't, so the resolver checks with our local name server (gate.debonne.net) to see if it knows the address. It does not. So our resolver reads the root server IPs from gate.debonne.net and contacts one of them (e.g. c.root-servers.net). The root server knows the name servers for yahoo.com. Our resolver then contacts one of those name servers, which has the IP for www.yahoo.com. Now armed with the IP, we can establish a connection.