The internet is made up of millions of cumputers each with their own unique Internet Protocol (IP) numerical address. The IP address is somewhat analogous to a telephone number. You may have seen such numbers before, e.g. 192.168.25.134 is an IP address.

While computers are happy dealing with a numerical addressing system, most humans have trouble remembering more than a handful of numbers. Numbers alone are also not very meaningful.

To make things easier for ourselves, the Domain Name System ("DNS") is used. This system allows a name to be associated with an IP address, disposing of the need to remember numbers for day-to-day use of the internet.

For example, we can feed a web site name such as "www.goweb.com.au" into our browser and our computer can then go off and find out the IP address of the web host from which it can download the web site.

It does this by querying a "name server". Essentially, it asks its favorite name server, "What IP address does www.goweb.com.au refer to?" This name server will either have the answer handy (if it has been asked the question recently before, and has remembered the answer), or it will have to ask a more authoritative nameserver.

If the hostname is valid, an IP address will be given back to your computer and it can then request the appropriate information from the web host having that IP address.

Obviously, the information linking a human-friendly hostname to its IP address needs to be stored somewhere in a database, accessible to the whole internet. Rather than have the whole database in one place, it is shared or "distributed" in a heirarchical manner among many thousands of name servers, each holding a subset of all the host names known on the internet.

At the upper levels of the heirarchy, the authorities for each publicly available domain ending - eg .com, .com.au, .net etc, maintain databases containing information relating to the domain names that have their extension. Here is a very simplified example of what the authority for .com.au domains might have

DOMAIN NAME	CONTACT INFORMATION	DELEGATED TO
aaaaaaabacus.com.au	Bill Broochgies 23 Silly St Nobblyville NSW 2999	nameserver.some-isp.net.au
aaaaaardvark.com.au	Miffy Schwawch 887 Long St Blahland NSW 2335	nameserver.some-other-isp.net.au
...	...	...
...	...	...
yummycookies.com.au	C. Monster 123 Sesame St Sugartown NT 0134	nameserver.justnet.com.au

This kind of database is held by the .com authority, the .net authority, in fact any authority on domain names needs to keep such a database. That way, when a name server is asked to resolve an IP address, based on the extension, it knows where to start looking. For example, a request for the IP address of www.yummycookies.com.au will first find out from the com.au authority, that the next place to check would be with JustNet's name servers. JustNet's name servers will have the answer and reply with the IP address for www.yummycookies.com.au.

When you redelegate a domain name you are basically updating the authority's database, telling it that you have a new set of nameservers that are taking care of your domain name.

So now that you know the basics of the DNS system, you might want to have a look at the GoDomains DNS hosting and management system!

Last updated 07 Apr 2005

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