What You Need to Know About DNS Safety

The DNS service provided by your internet service provider (Shaw, Telus, etc) is not safe, it will allow you to go anywhere on the internet. Plutomicro includes a DNS filter in most of our service packages that will keep you and your team safe on the internet.

DNS stands for Domain Name System. A domain is an internet identifier like google.com, microsoft.com, amazon.com, plutomicrobusiness.com, or yourbusinessname.com. DNS is like the phone book for domain names for your web browser.

Do you remember that thing called a phone book? It was this paper based book, and in it you look up a name and beside the name was a phone number. So when you wanted to call somebody, you’d get this brick of paper off the shelf, look up the person and call the number.

When you want to go to a website, you put the name of the entity in question in your web browser, and in the background, your computer looks up the IP address (think phone number) of the website, and your computer looks for a website at that IP address. Curiously, multiple websites can be at one IP address, kind of like extension numbers at a company.

Without DNS, the World Wide Web would be utilitarian. We again would be relegated to a paper brick that kept track company names and their IP address. Instead of going https://plutomicrobusiness.com in your web browser, you’d go to 162.241.24.62 . I guess if you memorized the IP for google.com, you could go there and search first.

One other critical thing DNS does is provide information about email addresses. When you press [Send] on an email, first your email server checks DNS. It asks, where is the email server for plutomicro.com, for example. Your email server then routes your email to the responsible server.

The Domain Name System works in the background, and we hardly even notice. So why am I telling you this. I am telling you to keep you safe.

As I said in the beginning, the DNS connection that your ISP provides isn’t safe. A DNS filter will keep you safe; kind of like if you were driving in an unfamiliar city, you stop and ask for directions and you start down a road to an unsafe neighborhood, and all of sudden there is a road block that says, “Don’t go there, somebody is trying to steal from you.”

Pluto Micro Blog by Grant ZoBell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.