It's basically system of computers that keep the names we know and can remember like google.com, msn.com, yahoo.com and translates them to the address of the computer that the site resides on. I admit if you don't know much about how websites work this may be a bit confusing still. I'll give you one example of how it is handy. In march I decided to switch companies that host my website. Now, since I own the domain name (hansenfarm.com), I can keep it but transfer the files to the new computer that I'm paying the hosting company to use. The old company's computer had a different IP address, but thanks to DNS, I can just re-register my domain name to be linked to the new computer my site is on. The point is that you, the user, will never know that my site is on a different computer because you still type the same name. This is all thanks to DNS!

So what happens when DNS is not working properly like mine the past month and a half? Well, you basically can't get to a lot of sites. I still don't know the technical details to the problem but it finally appears fixed. When you log into the internet, your computer is told which DNS server (computer) to ask for directions to websites. Well, for whatever reason, the one that was supposed to give me directions was not. It worked for most major sites but even my own website here I could not get to. About 9 out of 10 websites that I wanted to get to I could not. I got the message that the site did not exist which was obviously wrong when I knew I could reach it using another computer with another internet connection. I told my ISP and they had no answer for me - they said it was working for them so it must be a problem on my end. That was quite frustrating as all other volunteers using the service were experiencing the same problem. It took about a month of calls to finally get them to acknowledge we were having a problem.

So, DNS, a part of the internet people rarely think about. If it's not working properly, you'll know!