Whenever you visit any website on your computer or mobile device you type in the name of that website in your web browser and the browser loads up the website.
The browser actually has to communicate with other computers and servers in order to find the website that you want to visit in order to load the requested website.
These computers can be located in the same building, same area, same country or even across the globe.
In order for the browser to load up a website it has to communicate with the servers that could know where the website is located and it does that by using a domain name system.
The DNS takes the domain of the website and turns it into a number that is known as an IP address and each domain that is currently active on the internet is mapped to its own IP address.
The DNS is a mapper that maps all the domains to their IP addresses and every device that can connect to the internet has a built in IP resolver so it can resolve the domain it should connect to when you want to visit a website. Most of the times your internet service provider or ISP is the one that resolves the IP addresses for you but you can do it manually as well if you want.
A DNS resolver is a software is the software that your computer connects to when it doesn't know the IP address of the domain you want to visit to.
If the DNS resolver doesn't know the IP address of the domain it will ask other DNS resolvers about the domain and when the domain if found by one of the IP resolvers, your IP resolver will tell your computer that the domain that you want to visit is at this IP address and your computer will load the website and the DNS resolver will then cache the domain for future reference.
1.1.1.1 is a popular DNS resolver from Cloudflare.
I hope you liked this simple and beginner freidnly introduction to Domain Name Systems, if you have any questions please feel free to ask them in comments below.
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