What is DNS?

Domain Name System. It's the phonebook for the internet. People like us remember words better so we use domain names like yahoo.com and salvationarmy.org but computers go by IP addresses which are numbers like 192.168.1.1 and 127.0.0.1. For every domain name, there is a unique IP address bound to it. When you access a domain name in your web browser, the computer asks the DNS server first what the IP address is before it can actually go there.

DNS stands for Domain Name System. The main function of DNS is to translate domain names into IP Addresses, which computers can understand. It also provides a list of mail servers which accept Emails for each domain name.