What is DNS / Nameservers?

DNS (Domain Name Server) is the underlying reason that the internet works with such simplicity. Every day we type in different email addresses, websites and so on, but with thousands of servers all over the world how does your computer know where to find the requested website?

Well the simple way of thinking about this is the fact that names which are easy for humans to read (such as www.solarhost.co.uk or www.google.co.uk) are not very easy for computers to understand. In fact computers and web servers communicate to each other using numbers, known as 'IP addresses'. Every machine connected to the internet has an IP address, and every web server also has an IP.

A nameserver is the secret part of the internet which converts the names we type into our web browser into the IP address of the relevant server. In essence DNS is a database of domain names and corresponding IP's, which sounds so simple, but think about it:

Many Billions of website pages are viewed each day

You could access the DNS hundreds of times each day!

Many IP addresses change on a daily basis

New domains are registered and modified every second

When you subscribe to hosting from SolarHost, we ask you to order your domain from a Domain Registrar, we then explain to you how to update the DNS record for the domain, just as with above what we are actually asking you to do, is to update this global database so that when people use your domain, it knows that your website is actually on our servers.