DNS Stands for "Domain Name System." The primary purpose of DNS is to keep Web surfers sane.

Without DNS, we would have to remember the IP address of every site we wanted to visit, instead of just the domain name. DNS works in a client/server fashion. DNS is a hierarchical system. DNS organizes all registered names in a tree structure. The reason the Domain Name System is used is because Web sites are actually located by their IP addresses. For example, when you type in "http://www.google.com," the computer doesn't immediately know that it should look for google's Web site. Instead, it sends a request to the nearest DNS server, which finds the correct IP address for "google.com." Your computer then attempts to connect to the server with that IP number. DNS is just another one of the many features of the Internet that we take for granted. There are three levels of domains are there: Top level Domains Second level Domains Third level Domains (or) Local Domains

Top level Domain A TLD (top-level domain) is the highest level of domain names in the root zone of the DNS of the Internet. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of an Internet domain name that follow the final dot of a fully qualified domain name. For example, in the domain name www.dnsknowledge.com, the top-level domain is com. DNS server which keeps all root zone is called TLD name server. One generally cannot purchase names at this level.

Second level Domains These are domains that organizations can purchase from any of numerous accredited registrars. In the Domain Name System (DNS) hierarchy, a second-level domain (SLD) is a domain that is directly below a top-level domain (TLD). For example, in www.example.com, example is the second-level domain of the .com TLD. Second-level domains commonly refer to the organization that registered the domain name with a domain name registrar. Some domain name registries introduce a second-level hierarchy to a TLD that indicates the type of organization intended to register an SLD under it. For example, in the .uk namespace a college or other academic institution would register under the .ac.uk ccSLD, while companies would register under .co.uk. A country code second-level domain (ccSLD) is a second-level domain to a country code top-level domain. A ccSLD may be reserved by the domain name registry for the registration of third-level domains or assigned to a third party as a sub domain. Many countries implement additional classes as well. For example, the United Kingdom (uk) uses co.uk for commercial purposes and ac.uk for academic registrants. Third level Domains Local domains like compnetworking.about.com are defined and administered by the overall domain owner. DNS supports additional tree levels as well. The period ('.') always separates each level of the hierarchy in DNS. If you need to further distinguish your second-level domain name, you can use a third-level domain name, such as "name.sampledomain.com." Typically a third-level domain name is used to refer to different servers within different departments of a company.

Third-level domains can be set up as:

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Domain alias to a target domain Separate web hosting account

You can create a third-level domain using one of two different methods:
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By editing the A-record. Use this method if you want to point the domain name to a specified IP address. By editing the CNAME record. Use this method if you want to point the domain name to another domain name.

Note: The ability to edit DNS/MX records are available only to hosting customers.

Q. What is domain propagation? Ans. Domain Propagation is the period of time, or delay, involved in sending your domains address information to all the other name servers in the world. Name servers intentionally keep track of addresses for domains in their memory for a specific period of time which is defined by the administrator of the name server. This speeds up the process of looking up an address for a domain name. Unfortunately this cached information also stays in the name servers when it has been changed at the source of the original information (the domains registrar). Name servers refresh themselves from once an hour to once a day. Generally 2-3 days time is a good estimate when a domains DNS information is changed at the domain registrar, after which everyone in the world can see the change.

Q. Can I view my website even though my domains name servers havent propagated yet? Ans. Yes you can view your website even if your domais name servers havent propagated yet. This is how you can access the domain http://IP-ADDRESS/~username/ (The IP address of the server you are hosted on will be

provided to you upon sign-up.) Generally a new domain name takes about 24 to 48 hours to propagate all over the world wide internet. After the propagation across the Internet has completed, you will then be able to use your domain name. The first sign that the propagation is nearing completion is when your domain name shows unavailable when performing a WHOIS search. If you view the WHOIS information provided and it shows you as the owner, then your domain name has either completed propagation or will complete within the next day or two. When you yourself are able to point your browser to yourdomain.com and see your web site as well as assuring a few of your friends can do the same, then propagation has completed. To view the status of your domain name check multiple WHOIS searches rather than just one.

How to check whether the domain was propagated or not?

First, you'll have to verify that you can "ping" your name servers as well as server aliases. If your DNS host name is yourdomain.com, try pinging yourdomain.com to check if your DNS zone has propagated correctly. If you can able to see the output as the domain yourdomain.com is resolving into an IP, your DNS zone has propagated properly. Secondly, You can do telnet to your domain name with appropriate port number. If your domain has already propagated then the port should listen to your domain Example: telnet yourdomain.com 80 (where port 80 is for apache) You can also test using dig & nslookup for linux and windows machines respectively. For Linux machine: For Windows machines: dig yourdomain.com nslookup yourdomain.com

Apart from the above steps, Some wonderful tools to watch propagation are located below:

http://www.dnsreport.com http://www.dnsstuff.com http://www.domainwhitepages.com