Beginner’s Guide To DNS Management

What’s in a domain name?
It’s commonly assumed that when you visit a website the English-language address you enter refers to the actual location of that website. In fact, the addresses typed into browser bars are merely shorthand for a less intuitive string of integers. For example, you could enter www.vps.net into your preferred browser’s address bar and arrive at our homepage. Alternatively, you could also enter 69.36.161.17 into the address bar and reach the same destination. The latter is our internet protocol (IP) address, but would you remember that the next time you wanted to investigate server solutions or data centers?
The IP addresses of websites are effectively cloaked by domain names – human-friendly shorthand for those unmemorable strings of integers. To translate www.vps.net into a location your internet browser can understand, a domain name system will step in and ensure that the correct website is accessed. Think of DNS as an electronic librarian, directing people to the appropriate aisle and shelf for the title they’re seeking.
Clearly these domain name systems bear a great deal of responsibility for the internet’s ongoing functionality, and their governance is handled by DNS management software. This automates a large percentage of the laborious process of connecting domain names with the relevant websites. As recently as the late 1990s, every new domain had to be registered by email and manually entered into the Berkeley Internet Name Domain software that governed website addresses. Such inefficiency could be tolerated when the number of domains was measured in the tens of thousands, but today it has reached the hundreds of millions.
Not only are there now hundreds of millions of active domain names, with new ones being launched all the time, but the existing ones are also in a constant state of flux. Companies and individuals are forever changing their hosting provider, deploying new servers or automatically redirecting one website’s traffic to another related site. The volume of changes to domain names each year is hard to quantify, and impossible to govern manually.
The process of automating changes to domain name systems and their contents has long been delegated to scripts written in programming languages like Perl. It soon became evident that the Structured Query Language (more commonly referred to as SQL) was ideal for transferring domain information into a database known as a zone file, which maps out the connections between domain names and corresponding IP addresses. These files could be governed through a proprietary interface designed by the hosting provider, with different DNS servers used to prevent a newly-discovered security flaw in one being exploited in others.
While some DNS management software is expensively manufactured and resold, alternatives like Atomia DNS are free and open source. Managed via a web-based control panel, this Swedish platform represents an alternative to proprietary corporate solutions like CloudFlare or easyDNS. It is slightly ironic that modern-day DNS management is increasingly being handled through the cloud, using an internet web portal that itself relies on DNS to be more memorable and accessible. This fact alone demonstrates the crucial role that DNS management has to play in maximising internet accessibility.

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