Domain Name System The Domain Name System ( DNS ) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network . It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices worldwide. An often-used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses . For example, the domain name www.example.com translates to the addresses 192.0.32.10 ( IPv4 ) and 2620:0:2d0:200::10 ( IPv6 ). The Domain Name System makes it possible to assign domain names to groups of Internet resources and users in a meaningful way, independent of each en