An Introduction To Domain Names - Part II

Ok so now you know what is domain name, you’ve registered one and you’re ready to go. So what’s next?

A domain name is useless without a DNS server and a web hosting account. Your web hosting account will be used to store your webpages and make them available on the World Wide Web. So now you gotta have your domain name pointing to your web host. We’ll use a DNS server for this task.

For this tutorial, let’s pretend we’re trying to use mydomain.com as our domain name.

What Is A DNS?

Each web server is accessed by what is called an IP address. An IP address is made of four numbers separated by a dot and look something like this: 192.168.0.1

You could make a parallel between an IP address and a phone number.

Let’s say someone wants to call you over the phone. They just can’t type your name on the keyboard. They have to look up the phone directory, find your name and the corresponding phone number.

The same thing happens when you access a website (or any computer connected to the Internet for that matter): your computer looks up a phone book called a DNS (or a Domain Name System). The DNS finds the domain name and returns the corresponding IP address to your computer. Your computer will then use this address to connect to the remote host.

How Can I Use A DNS?

Ok first of all, your registrar (i.e. where you registered your domain name) probably has a DNS server made available for their clients. Your web host probably has a DNS server you can use too. It doesn’t matter where you registered your domain name and where you’re hosting your website: you can use any DNS server made available to you, you don’t have to use those provided by your registrar or web host.

Changing Your Domain Name’s Nameservers

The first thing to do is to find out your DNS servers’ hostnames. You will need at least two DNS server. You can get this information from your registrar or web host.

Once you’ve got your DNS servers’ information, go to your domain name control panel. Unfortunately, they are not all the same so I cannot show you what it’s like exactly. Once you’re logged in, find where you can change your domain name’s nameservers. When you found it, enter your nameservers’ hostname and save the changes.

Let’s pretend we’ve configured our domain name to use ns1.mynameserver.com and ns2.mynameserver.com.

Configuring Your Nameserver

We’re not done yet. At this point if you were to try to access http://www.mydomain.com, your computer would query ns1.mynameserver.com (or ns2.mynameserver.com) but no IP address would be returned because we haven’t configured our nameservers to resolve mydomain.com.

Log into your nameserver’s control panel (again, this can be made available by your registrar or web host). You now need to add mydomain.com to your nameserver. When you do this, you will be asked to provide the IP address of your web host. You can get this information from your web hosting provider.

Once you’ve configured your nameservers to resolve your domain name to your web host IP address, you must wait a couple of hours before the update is made through all the nameservers around the globe. This can take up to 48 hours but often it works within a matter of minutes.

What Else Is There To Know About DNS?

The informations provided in this post are pretty much conceptual stuff so you can get the idea about how DNS works. There are lots of other things you can do with DNS like setting up subdomains, mail exchange servers, aliases, etc.

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