The Website Owners Guide to DNS

Although people are good at remembering names they are not so good with numbers. Web addresses are therefore names for people but when computers communicate with each other they use numbers (IP Addresses).

DNS (Domain Name System) is a service that translates website names into IP addresses.

So when you type the web address www.mysite.com into a web browser the computer goes to a DNS service provider and requests that it translates they address into an IP address.

It then takes the IP address and uses it to contact the server that hosts the website www.mysite.com.

If you look at a standard Domain Name DNS entry it tells you the addresses of the servers that contain information about that domain. These are called the name servers and there are always two for resilience.

domain registration owner

All this happens in the background and as far as most website owners are concerned they have nothing to do with it.

Hosting Websites on Other Hosts

I recommend that you always use the same hosting provider for your domain name and website. If you do this the website name and IP address are usually automatically configured by the hosting provider and you don't normally need to be involved with the DNS configuration.

If however you have registered the domain with one provider and are using the web hosting services of another provider then you will need to adjust the DNS settings.

This doesn't involve entering IP addresses but names. The names are supplied by the hosting provider and are the names of the hosting providers DNS servers. These servers will contain the name and IP records of the respective website.

The screen shot below shows the DNS settings that I configured on 1and1 UK to point to my website hosted on bluehost. In this case the DNS registration was with 1and1 UK but the site hosted with bluehost in USA.

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