Internet Protocol and the Domain Name System

So how does the Internet know who 'www.icehousedesigns.com' for example? How does it know what machine out of millions that name is assigned to?

Enter the magic of I.P. addressing, or Internet Protocol. Each device is assigned an I.P. address on the Internet such as '207.219.345.212'. Certain machines are also assigned 'domain names' such as web servers. For example. Yahoo! can be reached by typing in http://www.yahoo.com in your browser window, or also by typing 64.58.76.227, which is the I.P. address of Yahoo's website. So who knows what I.P. is assigned to where? All domain names are handled by a company called Network Solutions, who are responsible for maintaining the whois database. No two names can be alike. The database is updated generally once or twice a day.There are also name servers from around the world and thousands of ISP's that update their name servers to match that of the whois database, generally once daily during off-peak hours. After all, it would be way to slow if we had only one database to use having millions of users polling it for information, and it is a lot easier to remember a simple name then a number right? Name servers are also called DNS servers, or Domain Name Servers. So when the average user types in a web server to visit, the DNS servers looks up the name for a match in the database which it updates from the whois database, once it finds a match it resolved the name to an I.P. Address, and it connects you to the appropriate machine.

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