We recently saw an infrographic posted to LinkedIn describing how DNS worked that was full of errors. Now no simple diagram is going to cover all aspects of DNS but we feel that ours is the best balance of accuracy and simplicity!
Some people suggested that the full DNS query (the FQDN) wasn’t submitted to the root servers – only the TLD element of it – but as far as we’re aware, it is indeed the full domain that gets sent.
It’s important to note however that in reality, barely any DNS queries actually make it to the root servers (an estimated 2% of all queries, some of which are errors or typos) and so your query is being serviced by a DNS server cache.
Here’s the image at a high resolution (for better printing) – at some point we’ll create a PDF version!
