What is DNS? How DNS works explained simply

DNS or Domain Name System hosting is where you have a list of records for how the internet uses your domain name.

It has the address (IP address) of your website hosting, so that peoples computers know where to find your website.

To illustrate, if you type in a domain name on your browser, let’s say rickrolled.com, your computer will quickly look up the DNS records and ask it where rickrolled.com is hosted. Then your browser will connect to that hosting server and grab the website files to show you the awesome website.

The same goes for emails.

DNS directs emails sent to your address, into your inbox.

It will look up the DNS hosting and kind of go, “The email server is over here so we send the email through this route.”

Aside from the IP address, DNS usually also includes domain verifications and SPF records which tell the internet that it’s cool to send the emails from a different server.

That means if you have a mail chimp account for example, you put an SPF record in your DNS hosting that says it’s cool for mail chimp to send emails on your behalf.

There are other records like this which prevent spam and make sure your legitimate emails get delivered.

That’s essentially what it is.

Where should you host your DNS?

We recommend using Cloudflare DNS hosting. It’s free and it’s super fast.

A major security benefit is that your website developer and your email IT consultant can access these important DNS records to do their job, without you giving access to control your whole Domain Name account.

Also, for your website developer, it makes it much easier to manage your website hosting and move you to a new server for hosting upgrades for example.

It also has a few added benefits such as blocking bot attacks, adding a layer of security and speeding up your website with a CDN among others that I explain in more detail in this video about using Cloudflare

If you need help with setting up your DNS hosting, shoot us an email to [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help.