This is a question that I get from novice users all the time. I won’t bore you with the intricacies of how things are done. Instead I will be giving you a very high level discussion on how the internet works. Read on for this dicussion.
For the purpose of our discussion let’s think of the internet as a very rapid mail system. In order for physical mail to be sent to the correct location it needs and address. The internet is no different. The address consists of four numbers with dots between them, for example 92.180.65.112 might be an address for a machine on the internet. This is called this machine’s ip address. Every computer connected to the internet has an ip address, even yours.
The problem with ip addresses as they are is that they are not useful for humans to use at all. So the people on the internet got together and decided on using domain names. Domain names are usually done as words to make it easier for humans to access servers on the internet. This site is hosted on a machine who is in the domain clayssite.com. The actual name of the server is www.clayssite.com. When you use that domain name, we need a way to translate that name into an ip address. That is where a class of servers called DNS servers do their jobs. They take your server name and translate it to an ip address.
It would be a bit hard for just one server to do all of that work for the entire internet. This work is shared amongst a whole lot of DNS servers. Your hosting service probably provides a DNS server that translates their hosted servers, and then indicates the next server to use to find the address. In fact all DNS servers do this. Just think of DNS servers as a kind of super phone book for the internet.
When you connect to the internet, your service provider gives your computer an ip address. This is usually one of many numbers it can use. When your computers starts up it uses a special server to help it get all the information it needs to communicate with the internet. This is called DHCP. It gives you an ip address, it tells you which ip address to go to get to the internet(gateway), and also tells your computer which DNS server to go to to begin resolving those domain names to ip addresses.
Next time:How Web Browsing Works
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