Computer technology has evolved exponentially over the years, and all of the new technology requires new terminology so that geeks have an idea what other geeks are talking about. Some hosting terms are acronyms, others are initialisms, and a few are combinations of everyday speech with a little twist. Today we’re going to look at the meaning of DNS and DNS propagation.

DNS – DNS is short for Domain Name System, which is a fancy term for the link between the website you enter into your web browser (http://www.readysetconnect.com) and the actual machine that stores the website’s files. We discussed a portion of the intermediate step in our article on Name Servers, but today we’re going to go a little deeper.

All modern technology revolves around the two digits 0 and 1 in the form of binary code. Binary code can very often be deciphered by humans in simple terms, but trying to read or write in binary is near impossible. Saying “hello” would look like: 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111. No one wants to read that, so our computers convert the digits to human-readable text. This makes our lives easier. The same process occurs when dealing with computer-to-computer communication.

All devices connected to the internet or some form of computer network are identified by a number called an IP address. For example, the IP of the computer you’re reading this article on is more than likely 127.0.0.1. But like binary, who wants to remember randomly and sometimes frequently-changing numbers just to visit a website? No one does, so the domain name system was created. DNS is the system that associates human-readable text (website addresses) with the number-based IP address of the remote computer. Instead of having to remember 209.85.171.100 when you want to visit Google, all you need to remember is Google.com. That’s much easier.

DNS Propagation – In our article on Name Servers we discussed the idea of a name server being equivalent to the listings of a telephone book. The name server is the machine that associates the name you remember and the address of the destination. DNS propagation is simply the time it takes for the new records of the name server and remote IP addresses to update on all computers. Thinking of our telephone book analogy, your friend may move to a new address, and it only takes you a minute to update your own phone book. While you may know the new address immediately, you will have to wait for the next round of phone books to ship from the phone company. This could be next week or, if the latest book just came out, as much as a year or two away. Fortunately, it only takes several hours for the changes to update for all computers on the internet, but the process is not instantaneous. Under normal conditions, it can take anywhere from 0 – 24 hours for all computers to be pointing to the same machine. So while you may be seeing that awesome new website you just posted, your friend down the street may have to wait a little while for his computer to update.