The Domain Name System is a distributed database arranged hierarchically. Its purpose is to provide a layer of abstraction between other Internet services (web, email, etc.) and the numeric addresses (IP addresses) used to uniquely identify any given machine on the Internet. | The Domain Name System is a distributed database arranged hierarchically. Its purpose is to provide a layer of abstraction between other Internet services (web, email, etc.) and the numeric addresses (IP addresses) used to uniquely identify any given machine on the Internet. |