Domain Name System (DNS)#

So far, we've been working with IP addresses. We've come to understand the different types of addresses and how we use them in both networking and addressing. An IP addresses isn't really much use to everyday users however. They're a cumbersome and hard to remember way for people to access resources online.

DNS solves this issue by making networked systems addressable through a human-readable name. In essence DNS converts the human readable name into the (usually) IP address the system uses.

One example of this is upload.academy. Two English words combined with a . got you to this book. Then there's content.upload.academy, which is the actual "location" of the book itself. These are DNS hostnames and they identify a specific system on a network - in this case the public Internet.

And to be complete about this, the actual full hostname is upload.academy. - notice the final, lonely . at the very end on the right? That's the root of the hostname.