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What are Nameservers?

What are Nameservers on the web?


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Whenever you type in your domain name in the browser to open your site, the request has to reach that particular server where your website is hosted. The website is then located on the server and the pages are downloaded to your computer.

However, it's not as simple as it looks.

A domain name as we know is your identity on the web. It is the "name" by which your website is known and is unique. That is, no two websites can have the same name. But in reality computers does not understand "names" as we know. Computers communicate with each other with numbers. The name of your website too in reality is a number called the Internet Protocol Address or the IP address which is unique globally for your website. A sample IP address for a website can be 10.250.216.1 which isn't easy to remember by humans.

An IP address is therefore the real address of a website. Since it is not possible for us to remember so many numbers domain names have been invented which everybody can easily understand, use, and remember. But computers identify each other by these numbers or the IP addresses.

Now there must be something which must resolve this problem, where we humans need not to remember numbers and computers get to see the numbers. This is exactly what a nameserver does.

A Nameserver can be thought of as a special computer which reads your domain number, and finds the corresponding physical (IP) address for the same and vice versa. So when a visitor types in the domain name in a browser while attempting to open a website, the browser first finds the nameserver which quickly reads the domain name and locates the physical address. The request is now carried on to the physical address and the website is located.

However, you don't need to worry about your nameservers. Your web hosting company will assign you a nameserver when you buy domain name and hosting.
Apr 11th, 2012 at 12:10 AM
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