Domain Name System

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers,
services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various
information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. Most prominently, it
translates easily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for the purpose of
locating computer services and devices worldwide

Uniform Resource Locator

A Uniform resource locator, abbreviated URL, also known as web address, is a specific character
string that constitutes a reference to a resource.

For Instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom... is a URL where asen.wikipedia.org is the domain

name named using the DNS.

A domain name consists of -

a Top Level Domain (TLD) identifier string, like COM, NET, ORG, US, IN etc. to the right of
a dot.
a Second Level Domain (SLD) identifier string of up to 63 case-insensitive ASCII characters
(a-z, A-Z, 0-9), to the left of the dot. The string may additionally contain a hyphen in between
two characters. The hyphen cannot be at the start or end of the string, and consecutive hyphens
are not allowed.
a TLD is managed by a registry, who are governed by http://ICANN.org.
SLDs are issued and managed by registrars, who are also accredited and governed by ICANN.
One doesn't own a domain name, but registers it for a period ranging from 1 to 10 years, and
must keep on renewing it to continue to use it.

The domain name usually maps to some web space on a web server via its IP-address, or it may be
set to redirect to some URL.

Examples:
quora.com
google.com
bing.com
itsSri.com
.com (Telugu IDN, actual representation on DNS as xn--rpcl5a0c.com)

.com (Hindi IDN, actual representation on DNS as xn--t2bl5a0c.com)

URL means Uniform Resource Locator. It is a string of characters that specifies the location of a
resource on the world wide web, and follows a uniform syntax for that.

a URL starts with a protocol identifier like http or ftp, followed by a colon and 2 slashes, and
finally the resource name, and optionally followed by a colon and a port number.
the primary identifier in a resource name may be a domain name, or an IP-address.
a URL may be static or dynamically generated using database(s) and programming.
the length of a URL is only limited by what your browser allows, e.g., IE has a limit of 2083
characters.
a URL is not administered or governed by any external entity, except for the guideline on
uniform syntax. If you don't use the syntax, at most your browser would not give any response,
or may give a malformed response.

Examples:
http://www.quora.com/Srinivasa-Rao-98
ftp://example.com/example.txt
http://192.168.0.10
http://192.168.0.10:10000

When you point example.com to ns1.example.com you will need to add an ip address
for ns1.example.com in order for your domain to start working. That is called a glue record.
A nice example is the root zone. If you are on a Linux or Mac open a terminal and run "dig" without
any parameters. What you will get is the root zone. That is where the DNS tree starts. Without the ip
addresses you would have nowhere to go. How could you get to the top level domains without root
telling you?

DNS : Domain Name service is mechanism to translate IP address to domain and vice versa...
Human brain can remember names better than numbers for example it is easy to remember
"http://www.quora.com" rather than its IP 103.243.13.60. So whenever you
typehttp://www.quora.com in your broswer, DNS server configured in your network address gets a
query for IP address of http://www.quora.com. check yourself start>run>type "nslookup" and now
enter "http://www.quora.com" and you will get IP of quora, same procedure is used by browser...
I hope now you understand
PS: dont use https in nslookup just name

Domain names are used to identify one or more IP addresses. For example, the domain

name microsoft.com represents about a dozen IP addresses. Domain names are used in URLs to identify

particular Web pages. For example, in the URLhttp://www.pcwebopedia.com/index.html, the domain name

ispcwebopedia.com.
Every domain name has a suffix that indicates which top level domain (TLD) it belongs to. There are only a limited

number of such domains. For example:

gov - Government agencies
edu - Educational institutions
org - Organizations (nonprofit)
mil - Military
com - commercial business
net - Network organizations
ca - Canada
th - Thailand

Because the Internet is based on IP addresses, not domain names, every Web server requires a Domain Name

System (DNS) server to translate domain names into IP addresses.

What is the difference between domains vs hosting vs website?

When you have a site visitor, they use your domain name to view your website. As simple as it seems, there
is a process that occurs from the time that the site visitor types in your domain and presses enter.

When a site visitor enters your domain name into a browser, the domain is then translated into your server IP
address, then the server sends that user your site files, which their browser represents to them as a typical
web-page.You can see that, without each of these 3 elements, you won't really have a web-site.

The three basic parts that make up any current day website are:

Domain Names
Web-Hosting Servers
Site Files

Domain Names
Computers communicate by using numbers, called IP addresses, to contact each other, much like you use a
phone number to dial a specific person's phone. Domain names on the internet are much like entries in a
phone book. The phone book tells people looking for a business what the entries are just as a domain tells
people (i.e. their computers) that a domain is hosted on the server.

Without a domain, you would have to tell your customers that your site is located at a temporary url such as
123.456.789.123/~mysite instead of using a domain name such as mysite.com, making your site appear
unprofessional and impractical.

Web-Hosting Servers

The web-hosting or server is much like the space that you rent out to have your business in. It's merely the
space itself. It does not include furnishings like shelves for your products, just as the web-hosting account
doesn't include a site for you to sell your products.

Luckily, in the web-hosting world, it's very easy to furnish the space provided by your host, because you can
install many framework applications through the QuickInstallicon within your cPanel.

Without the hosting services, you won't have a place for your files to reside, so your domain would then
become like a disconnected phone number in the phone directory, and your site files would have nowhere to
stay.

Site Files

The site files are what your visitors and potential customers actually see when going to site such as your
products and services. The site files are the same as any other file you normally use, like a .jpg photograph,
or .mp3 music file. Though, website files are also .php files or .html files, which are PHP scripts or html pages
respectively.

The web-hosting server knows how to read these files, which explain how the webpage looks or instruct the
server to do a series of computations. These computations are things like figuring out what blog article it's
supposed to send back to the viewer, or what forum post it's supposed to send back.