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What is a name server?

The Internet works with numbers, IP numbers to be specific. The use of names for computers is for our benefit, since we remember names more easily than numbers. This is why we have a name to number mapping for each computer on the Internet. However, to avoid forcing each computer to have a database of the name to number mappings for all the machines in the world stored locally for its own reference, a configuration file for each computer specifies a name server. A name server is a computer, such as allynne.com, that stores the relevant information for its domain in a proper format, and provides the number to name mapping (among other things) to other computers upon request. This is called the Domain Name Service (or DNS). Because these databases are kept on machines local to the network for which they provide the authoritative DNS data, they are as up-to-date as possible, much more so than if each machine on the Internet had to keep data on all other machines in the world.

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