Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Jun 03, 2006

I get lots of questions about DNS from the semi-technical and often struggle for ways to describe what it is. I finally came up with a simple analogy that anyone can use to explain the basic purpose of DNS to anyone.

Interestingly, the solution lies with a piece of hardware. Something so ubiquitous that no matter how tech saavy or incompetent you are, you surely know enough to have used one. I'm talking about the mobile phone of course.

In DNS, a web site is translated into an IP address and the IP address then sought out by your web browser. Some clever masking takes place but that's about the gist of it. In a similar way, your mobile phone's address book is like a DNS server. It takes the numbers and translated them into entries that you can understand.

For example, when you type urbanpuddle.com into your web browser, DNS translates that URL into an IP address such as 216.203.146.175. In a similar way, when you look up Mom in your cell phone's address book, it translates that into a number such as 201-555-1223.

Simple isn't it?