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Question about how web domains work (lemmy.one)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello fellow Lemmings! I hope this is the right place to ask this. I don't understand how web domains work. Let's say I want to buy the domain "abcdefghi.net". I can go to a domain provider like haruba or godaddy and just buy it. but how can they, a private, sell me these domains? I'm not talking about the hosting, but just the domain. where do they register this domain I'm buying? isn't it possible to register it myself instead of paying these services to do it for me?

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[–] taladar 1 points 2 years ago

Technically the root DNS servers are the ones hosting com, net, org,... and the country top level domains and registrars sell you domains under those which can have their own set of DNS servers.

but no other computer would be able to access them because by default the convention is to trust only the ICANN DNS servers.

It is not just a matter of only trusting those. There is also no real way to check multiple DNS servers for a single domain and combine the results in a meaningful way. Some systems allow you to configure that requests for specific domains and all their subdomains use a different DNS server for lookups and another DNS server for everything else and of course you can configure multiple servers for redundancy and your system will use one at random or use one when the other is not reachable but you can't really configure two DNS servers with different views of domains and expect the results to magically combine as needed.