When you sign up for a web hosting account you will usually receive a confirmation email and somewhere in the email they will probably list your primary and secondary nameservers. To be honest, most people who buy web hosting plans couldn’t care less what name servers actually are, they just want to get their website up and running.
For those people I will give a quick and dirty explanation. Configuring the primary and secondary nameservers is what allows the website you upload to show up when you type in the domain address (www.yourwebsite.com) The primary is always used first (hence primary), and the secondary nameserver is a backup if connection to the primary name server fails.
Find the web based control panel where you purchased your domain and input both the primary and secondary nameservers into the required fields for your domain. If you purchased the domain name from the same provider that you have a hosting account with, the nameservers may even already be configured for you. Once this is set up you will probably never look at or deal with the nameservers again, unless you move to a new web host.
But Seriously What are Nameservers?
Okay you really want to know?
Name Servers receive requests from programs and other name servers to convert domain names (www.yourwebsite.com) into a more computer friendly “IP address†(ex. 64.223.342.312) This is used to connect to the server where your website resides.
As wikipedia puts it:
“A name server is a computer server that implements a name service protocol. It will normally map a computer-usable identifier of a host to a human-usable identifier for that host. For example, a Domain Name System (DNS) server might translate the domain name en.wikipedia.org to the Internet Protocol (IP) address 145.97.39.155â€
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