This document celebrates the 31st anniversary of the Domain Name System (DNS) which was introduced in November 1984. It provides a brief history of how DNS was developed by Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris at the University of Southern California to address the growing difficulty of remembering IP addresses as the predecessor to the internet, ARPANET, expanded. DNS works by translating easy to remember domain names into their corresponding IP addresses, allowing computers to communicate over the internet. It concludes by explaining how DNS is a crucial component of the internet that enables all online activities and influences performance, and why outsourcing DNS to an expert provider can improve reliability.

1. Celebrating 31 Years
Of The Domain Name
System (DNS) This
Month!

2. November 1984, RFC882 and RFC883 were
launched, introducing the world to DNS.
DNS is a crucial part of the Internet
Infrastructure – it plays a role in ALL
DNS lookups. Without DNS, there
would be no Internet, so we are happy
to announce its birthday today!

3. A Bit of History…
Twenty years ago, two computer scientists
at the University of Southern California created a
key component essential to the modern Internet.
Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris ran the first
successful test of the automated domain name system, or DNS,
which allows computers to find each other on the network and send information
back and forth to each other without having humans manually look up the
addresses of each machine.
The concept sounds simple now, but it was revolutionary 20 years ago.

4. As the predecessor of the Internet,
ARPANET, grew larger, connecting to
remote machines by their IP Address grew
cumbersome. It became more and more
difficult for people to remember the IP
Addresses associated with the machines
they were trying to reach that a system
was created to translate easier to
remember symbolic names to their
equivalent numerical IP Address. Thus the
Domain Name System was born.

5. What is DNS?
A key component of the Internet and how it works revolves around the Domain
Name System, otherwise known as DNS. The underlying technology behind the
Internet, is that when a computer needs to talk to another computer on the
Internet, they communicate via the computer's IP Address. The IP Address is a
unique set of numbers associated with a particular machine.
An example of an IP Address is 216.239.51.99, which is the IP Address
that corresponds to www.google.com.
www. .com = 216.239.51.99

6. Real Life Example…How DNS Works
You open up a web browser and
Try to connect to www.google.com.
Your Operating System, not
Knowing the IP Address, asks
Your ISP’s DNS Server for the
IP Address for www.google.com.

7. ISP PROVIDER ROOT SERVER
Your ISP’s DNS Server, if it does not know the IP
Address, connects to a Root Server and asks the
Root Server for the appropriate Name Server to
query which knows information about Google.com.

8. ROOT SERVER ISP PROVIDER
The Root Server tells your ISP’s DNS Server the
appropriate DNS Server to contact for information
about Google.com.

9. The ISP’s DNS Server connects to Google’s DNS
server and asks for the IP Address for
www.google.com.
DNS SERVER
ISP PROVIDER

10. DNS SERVER
Google’s DNS Server responds to the ISP’s DNS
Server with the appropriate IP Address =
216.239.51.99
ISP PROVIDER

11. ISP PROVIDER Your Operating System
The ISP’s DNS Server tells your Operating System
the IP Address for google.com.

12. Your Operating System tells the Web
Browser the IP Address for
www.google.com. The web browser
connects and starts communication with
www.google.com
Web Browser
Your Operating System

13. Conclusion
As you can see, the Domain Name System is essential in the use of the
Internet. For any company that leverages the Internet for sales, marketing or
information, business continuity depends on 100% site availability and fast
loading times. Everything on the Internet relies on DNS: web, email, video,
audio, and more. This means, no matter how fast your Internet connection
speed is, a site won’t load unless the DNS server has performed the lookup
successfully. Unreliable and poor performing DNS directly affects your Internet
presence – and speed.

14. Why Outsource DNS?
Here at DNS Made Easy, DNS is our
lifeblood. It's what we do. We are experts
In DNS. All of DNS Made Easy systems
Are located at premium data facilities with
Multiple data providers. From a network standpoint DNS Made Easy is in the
top tier of DNS providers worldwide. We have a historical
8-year 100% uptime and an overall 99.9999% uptime history due to our
5th generation network, and continue to make significant improvements to
redundancy and capacity to make sure we keep it that way.