What Are Nameservers (And What They Do)

Nameservers are part of the DNS (Or Domain Name System) and are used to control your domain and its contents. Nameservers tell the visitors browser where the web server is located, so the website can be loaded. Let's dive in!

What exactly are nameservers?

Nameservers are used to connect your URL or domain (For example, google.com) to your website’s server. Nameservers do this by telling your computer what IP address holds your website. In short, when you type in a URL (like google.com) your computer finds the nameservers for that website (Like ns1.google.com and ns2.google.com). These nameservers are used to tell the web browser what IP address to use to display the website. Your web browser then visits this IP, downloads the files, and shows you the website!

What if there were no nameservers?

If nameservers did not exist, we would have to type in a series of numbers and possibly letters as well (Such as 168.231.33.21 or 20024:4689:1FE4::4689:1FE4) every time we wanted to visit a website. Now that would be hard to memorize! Nameservers are here so we only have to memorize the simplicity of a domain name, and not a seemingly random string of characters.

How do I know what nameservers to use?

If you have a domain, but don’t know what nameservers to use, you should ask your hosting provider. Each hosting provider has different nameservers, pointing to different servers, that help your visitor find your website. If you don’t have a web hosting provider yet, check out iFastNet or InfinityFree

Conclusion

In conclusion, nameservers are used to translate a URL to an IP address, so you don’t have to memorize a string for each of your favorite websites. Nameservers help out millions (Maybe billions) of people every day, so remember to silently thank them whenever your favorite cat video site loads quickly next time! If we just confused you more, we’re sorry, send us a message and we will try to help you understand.