VIDEO: DNS Resolution for Websites

How The Domain Name Resolution Process Works for Websites

DNS Resolution: Matching domain names to corresponding IP addresses

1. When you type a domain name into your browser – let’s use www.dnib.com – a query goes out to find the corresponding IP address. The first server your query goes to is a resolver. The recursive resolver asks other DNS servers to find the IP address.
2. The resolver sends a query to the root servers. The root servers – located all over the world – know information about all top-level domains, like .com, .org, .net and .de. They provide the resolver with the IP address of a TLD’s name server. The global DNS infrastructure, supporting TLDs, resolves billions of queries daily.
3. Next, the query goes to the TLD name server, which provides information about the name server managing the specific domain name you queried. Each TLD name server knows IP addresses for the SLD name servers managing sets of second-level domains.
4. The resolver now queries the SLD server that knows the IP address for the domain name’s website. The answer is returned to the resolver.
5. The resolver sends the IP address to the browser. Now the browser can use the IP address, connect to the website and retrieve its content.
6. The recursive resolver sends the IP address to the browser. This entire process happens in a fraction of a second, hundreds of billions of times per day.