Practical DNS guides covering resolvers, leaks, encrypted DNS, caches, authoritative servers, and VPN behavior.
A DNS resolver is the component that actually performs (or requests) lookups on your behalf — distinguishing your device's stub resolver from the recursive resolver actually doing the network work clarifies who's really answering your queries.
A recursive resolver walks the DNS hierarchy on your behalf when it doesn't have a cached answer — following referrals from root to TLD to authoritative servers, with caching and negative answers shaping how often each step is actually needed.
Authoritative DNS servers are where a domain's actual records live — distinct from resolvers, which query them, and structured through zones, delegation, and primary-secondary replication for reliability.