Have you ever searched for a product by looking at 54.239.36.155? Maybe you’ve allowed yourself a look at the infamous ‘sidebar of shame’ at 54.246.154.121? Luckily for all involved, we don’t refer to websites by their IP addresses, we deal in the much friendlier – and easy to remember – realm of words and names (The above examples are the numbers for Amazon and the Daily Mail).
It’s DNS technology that makes the internet a more user friendly place for us in this way. DNS stands for ‘domain name system’ and refers to the technology that allows us to associate a company name with the space occupied by the sort of long numbers shown above.
In many ways it’s a modern, digital way of performing the function of the phone book, as I Want My Name demonstrates. Where we’d previously pore through the pages of a book to find the number that gets us in touch with a person or company, we now type in words to access their number instead.
Clearly, without DNS we’d all be drowning in a sea of impossible to remember numbers so it’s an important part of making the wonders of the world wide web accessible to all. It’s especially important to businesses. In order to make it easy for customers to find you and purchase your products and services you need to make it easy to find you – having your business name and web address in line makes this a natural, simple process that we all take for granted.
So, what is DNS management?
Your domain name, then, is vital. You need to protect this in order to protect your online identity.
Writing on Hubspot, Stephanie Fisher points out how many businesses are caught out when they leave all of their DNS to one IT person, who could leave you in the lurch if, for some reason, they leave the company in the future.
DNS management is the process of taking charge of your DNS data and where it is accessed. It allows you to choose which servers host the various elements of your website and can transfer sections from one server to another to maximise the performance of your site. Most sites exist on several servers, making management of this nature important and fairly widespread.
For many businesses this is something that they simply don’t want to be added to their long to-do list and, with something so fundamental, it’s well worth calling on an expert to handle this on your behalf. It’s certainly better than leaving all of your DNS eggs in the basket of one enthusiastic employee,
So, for example, if you consider domain registration by WestHost, management of this is one of the many functions you can also benefit from. Essentially, businesses should search this out at the registration stage. They need to know that management is taking place, they don’t necessarily need to roll their sleeves up and handle this for themselves.
