What is DNS and Propagation?

Hosting and registration are two of the more important aspects of building a website. Without registering your website and without hosting it you cannot have a website. Registration is like a driver's license in that registering your domain at your registrar gives you the right to use a particular domain for your website but doesn't actually give you a website. In that analogy, hosting is like a car. it is your space online where you can add all the things your website needs.

DNS is the way that the domain registrar connects to your hosting account. DNS stands for Domain Name Service. To understand DNS, let's walk through what happens when you type a particular website address into your browser.

When you type in, for example, qwconsulting.com, the browser has to figure out where the files for that domain lives. The first step to find that website is to look up the domain at your registrar. This lookup eventually reaches your domain registrar and your registrar then responds with the information to access your host. That hosting information is used to access the hosting company and ask the hosting company where the domain lives at that host. The host will respond with the IP address specific to that particular website and then, finally, the browser, now knowing exactly where your website is at on the web, will display your website files.

To make this process move more quickly, your internet service provider keeps a local copy of the DNS records. That way, instead of looking up the website's hosting information at the registrar every time a request is made, the look up can be done more locally in a centralized location. The local copy of the DNS records is updated periodically. This process of updating that local copy of a DNS record is called propagation.

To make all this work for your website requires telling your registrar where your website is hosted by providing your registrar with the DNS information from your hosting company. Once you have entered this information your registrar will update the DNS information that is looked at when a domain request is made. However, since internet service providers keep a local copy of the DNS records, this update will take time to propagate, or update, through all the different internet service provider's local copies of the DNS records. The same is true for new domains and for existing domains when you change hosting companies.

For more information about DNS - or any other web related questions - contact QW Consulting today.