Speed up your web browsing in a few clicks: A brief introduction to DNS

Lifehacker:

Every millisecond counts when you’re browsing the web, and if you’d like to eke a bit more speed out of your internet connection, you can change your DNS server to make those pages load a bit faster. Here’s a brief introduction to what DNS is, how it affects your connection speed, and how you can easily change your computer’s settings to use the fastest DNS possible.

After today’s outages, I thought a little primer on what DNS is might be appropriate.