Domain Name System (DNS) setup is the starting point for any website, web system, or email to live on the web.
The easiest starting point is from your computer or other internet capabable device. A device that is connected to the internet has an IP address (Internet Protocol) assigned by the ISP (Internet Service Provider). Your ISP may provide the connection to your home via phone, data, electrical cable or wireless. Your connection is your starting point for the 'who', then next peice you need is the 'where'. You can find out what your IP is at your home, and at your work (they will be different) by using WhatIsMyIp.com.
Understanding how stuff works can be made easier with analogies
The Internet is like water to your home; once it is connected or provided for the first time it is always on unless you actively turn it off, or, if you do not pay your bill for services and get disconnected.
Once connected to the Internet, your device can both send and receive information while the device is on.
When you type a web address into a browser using its URL (Uniform Resource Locator), your request goes to the master registry that looks up the Domina Name System (DNS) information for that website from the Registrar. The registrar holds the URL name, and the correlating server IP address. Once the IP Address of the website you want is found, your ISP patchs you through, requesting the data from that server and present it back to your browser for viewing.
The DNS lookup and request to the source sever happens in a fraction of a second as the amount of data in the request is tiny. However, the website you are loading can take a lot longer to appear if the site is poorly optimized, if your internet connection is slow, or both. If you type in an incorrect URL for example, "incrediblyweirddomainname.com" you will get a result like “incrediblyweirddomainname.com’s server DNS address could not be found.” If curious, you can find our the DNS information of a website yourself by using WhoIs.com.
Who provides website and dns hosting?
In the early years of the internet, hosting your email or website was often done by a computer-savvy person in your neighbourhood who would set it up on their own computer or server, running in their basement. Your mail and website DNS listing would be pointed at their servers IP address, and that machine would send and receive on your behalf. If that machine got accidentally turned off, or if the power went out to that house, your email and website would be offline.
As the internet has matured dedicated hosting providers emerged who would ‘host’ your website and email on their servers for a fee. Hosting is analogous to renting an apartment in a building (if personal), or a store in a mall (if business related). You have the protection of an experienced landlord who knows how to take care of the hosting servers and make sure you stay online. In recent years Cloud Hosting companies who use distributed servers, often leasing space on servers wherever it is cheapest and most efficient to use. In cloud hosting you never know the physical location of the hardware that your website or email is on, just that it works.
What can go wrong, and why does it go wrong?
Expiry
A DNS lookup depends on the registry information to be up to date. A domain can expire, which ends the ability for the register to connect users to the end server. Domains can be renewed annually, or for up to 10 years. Domain registration is like a postal redirection order. It needs to remain in place permanently while you have a website at the other end of the connection that is live.
Broken line or volume overload
The ability for your website or search request to reach the destination server is based on an unbroken transfer of the request. A broken switch, router, server, or firewall can all stop your request in its tracks. It can be impossible for you as the end user to work out where the break is, and the fastest way to know if it is your local computer or those of the destination website is to try browsing to google.com. If the google page loads, then the problem is not your computer or your local internet connection.
Sometimes a connection is not broken but flooded with requests. Think of it like a commuter-logged highway. When there is so much traffic, everyone slows to a crawl or even a stop. It doesn’t mean that your car is broken, or that the road to where you are going is broken. Given a short amount of time, the volume will clear and normal service resumes.
Hacking and malicious acts
In some cases, the volume overload is caused deliberately to try and overwhelm a server and get it to expose pieces of information that could unlock it. All professional hosting providers employ various degrees of intrusion monitoring and detection. You would be surprised to know just how frequently an everyday website and web server is being pinged with login spoofing attempts. Probably as you are reading this article, at least on attempt has been made to find out the login information to gain control of this server and ‘slave’ it to a network that can send through it, sometimes without detection by the owner.
Professional internet and hosting service providers are your best protection. Even in the biggest of services there may be outages (Twitter October 21st, 2016 ). In any incident your service provider will be 100% focused on getting to the resolution as fast as possible.
