Name Servers

The Name Servers are a key part of the DNS system because they can be used to point the traffic of our domain to a specific hosting provider or server.

You can find the Name Servers also written as Nameservers, or DNS Servers, and it’s fine, they refer to the same so feel free to use the one you like the most.

A Name Server is a special server that has the job of handling the different requests that the users do. They’re used to tell which is the exact location of the different services that a domain can provide, which can be, for example, a website or an email service.

A Name Server is like a telephone directory, you can look up someone’s name in there and you will see which number you have to call to get in touch. This is the same, but in this case, the one doing the lookup and calling will be the computer or device you’re using, while the name server will act as the telephone directory, providing the information.

What does a request look like for a Name Server?

First of all, let’s say you want to access mydomain.com, so you type in your browser’s address bar: mydomain.com
This is what happens in the following second (or less!) after pushing enter: your local computer or whatever device you’re using checks the NameServers for mydomain.com, and uses that data to contact the server that hosts the DNS zone.

The DNS server provides the IP address of the web server that hosts the site, then your local computer contacts the server that hosts the site and asks “Hey, can you please display mydomain.com for me?” in its own language, and the web server provides the data of the website you’re looking for, displaying it in your web browser.

Of course, depending on the site size and the server that hosts it, the load time will probably be more than a second, but all the communication between the computer and the name servers is done super fast.