The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most fundamental components of today’s
Internet.
In fact, most Internet applications, including e-mail and WWW, depend on the DNS
in some way.
This is also the case for applications that support IPv6 and for new IPv6 specific
applications.
DNS is a global database system which provides a mapping from a host name1 (such as
find-ip-address.org) to an IP address (208.76.80.74), or vice versa.
It is a distributed and hierarchical system, ensuring coherency as well as avoiding a single point
of failure. The results of database lookups are often cached, reducing network traffic and server
load, and increasing lookup efficiency.