what is dns?

Answer 1

Domain Name System or Domain Name Service.

Its what translates a web site name to an IP address so that you can find Yahoo.com at yahoo.com instead of at an IP address.

Makes things much easier on the web. It runs behind the scenes to invisibly translate your requests. Think of it as a large automated white pages.

Answer 2

If you spend any time on the Internet sending e-mail or browsing the Web, then you use domain name servers without even realizing it. Domain name servers, or DNS, are an incredibly important but completely hidden part of the Internet, and they are fascinating. The DNS system forms one of the largest and most active distributed databases on the planet. Without DNS, the Internet would shut down very quickly. Human-readable names like "yahoo.com" are easy for people to remember, but they don't do machines any good. All of the machines use names called IP addresses to refer to one another. For example, the machine that humans refer to as "www.yahoo.com" has the IP address 216.183.103.150. Every time you use a domain name, you use the Internet's domain name servers (DNS) to translate the human-readable domain name into the machine-readable IP address. During a day of browsing and e-mailing, you might access the domain name servers hundreds of times and not even know it!


Hope this helps!

Answer 3

dns is "dynamic naming service"
Everything on the internet comes down to numbers
If you could remember those numbers you could type them instead of addresses such as
www.yahoo.com
or www.mikesapartment.com

the numbers are too long to remember
Somewhere there is a computer service running that translates those numbers into addresses of letters so that you can navigate the web easier
If you actually know those numbers you can navigate the internet by typing those numbers
Just makes it easier

To speed up your internet check out open dns

http://www.opendns.com/