Overview of the Domain Name System (DNS).
In the early days of the Internet, hosts had a fixed IP address.
Reaching a host required to know its numeric IP address.
With the growing number of hosts this scheme became quickly awkward and difficult to use.
DNS was introduced to give hosts human readable names that would be translated into a numeric IP addresses on the fly when a requesting host tried to reach another host.
To facilitate a distributed administration of the domain names, a hierarchic scheme was introduced where responsibility to manage domain names is delegated to organizations which can further delegate management of sub-domains.
Due to its importance in the operation of the Internet, domain name servers are usually operated redundantly. The databases of both servers are periodically synchronized.