Domain Name Services, or DNS, are used to, amongst other things, translate a URL (www.example.com) to an IP address (192.168.145.1). In that, it is kind of like the phone book (contact list) on your phone. Most people just look for the entry for “jane”, they don't actually know her phone number.

There are several DNS servers available, and for special purposes, some are much better than BIND, which is possibly the most widely used (and possibly oldest) name server. All of our documentation will concentrate on BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) which was released in 1986 and its current incarnation, BIND9, was release in 2000. It is available on all common server platforms.

While the main configuration is done via the command line, there are various packages available to allow you to manage BIND9 from a web interface with WebMin (https://webmin.com/ the most widely known. Most control panels also include a BIND module, including ISPConfig3 (https://www.ispconfig.org/), one of the best open source control panels available.

See the following Wikipedia articles for additional information:

• BIND
• Comparison_of_DNS_server_software