Bonus: More about DNS

You don't need to know this to publish your site, but in case you were curious about DNS, here's more info.

DNS Records

In the lesson on domains and hosting, you learned what DNS is for. Now let’s talk a about what it actually looks like! The graphic showed the record like this:

At its heart, DNS is really simple: it matches a name and a value. In this case, the name kibo.school is matched with the value 162.159.135.42

The actual DNS record looks like this:

kibo.school.		3600	IN	A	162.159.135.42

This says that kibo.school points to 162.159.135.42. It’s also got some extra info:

• There’s an extra . after kibo.school
• There’s a TTL of 3600
• It’s an IN search
• It’s an A record

The extra dot means that it’s an absolute domain name. You can basically ignore this. (If it bugs you, you can read an explanation here.)

TTL stands for “time to live”. It says how long a DNS server should keep a copy of this record before it checks again. If it’s shorter, updates to the DNS record will show up faster, but the website might load slower.

A is the type of record.

IN is for INternet. All DNS records are IN.

Types of DNS Records

There are lots of different types of DNS records. Different types tell different kinds of information, like:

• MX records: The email server is located at this address
• CNAME records: This name points to a different name (instead of an IP address)

A records match a domain name to an IP address. For matching the domain [kibo.school](http://kibo.school) to the address 162.159.135.42, we use an A record.

As noted in the video, IP addresses like 162.159.135.42 are version 4 addresses. AAAA records are for IP version 6.

Try it: Mess with DNS

👉🏿 Get hands-on practice creating DNS records to tell browsers where to find different websites.

Questions about DNS

🤔 You’ve probably learned some pieces about DNS, but not everything.

Check your understanding of DNS and learn some more facts about DNS with this interactive game.

Further Reading