Knowledgebase

To understand what a nameserver does first you must equate a domain name to an ip address. A domain name, yourdomain.com is really a nice way of representing an ip address(eg 135.55.90.12).  The ip address is really the address of your webserver. The internet governing body decided that making domain names was a nice way of being able to remembering the location of a website.

A nameserver is an application that holds a table of domain names and the ipaddresses associated with them. When you tell your browswer to go to yourdomain.com by pointing and clicking or by typing it manually, your browswer makes a request to the nameserver at your ISP. Your ISP then knows real address....the ipaddress.. to send your browswer to.

This nameserver information is replicated all over the world to as many nameservers as your connection will reach. This is what gives all of the people in the world the ability to find the machine where you website is located.

A typical website configuration utilizes 3 ip address. One ip is for the server machine that holds your website and the other 2 are for the nameserver machines that do the lookup on what your website server ip is. The nameserver is simply a place where your browswer goes and looks up what machine your website is on and gives the request back to browser.

Why do you need two. You need two of them incase one fails. If one fails or is overloaded you will then have a backup nameserver serving the requests and keeping traffic going to your site.

Add to Favourites

Print this Article