Do you remember the time before everyone had computers that fit in their pocket, when companies would ship a book full of phone numbers to your doorstep? We new who to look for, but we had to look up their phone number unless we had it memorized. Your domain name, by default is nothing more than a shortcut, an address, or (to fit this very imperfect analogy) a phone number. When you type a domain name into the URL bar of your browser, someone/something has to identify it and tell the browser what to display. That’s where a name server comes in.
A name server is a computer, running as a server, that keeps a record of all the domain names that are associated with it and keeps track of where those domains should go. In the case of digitalscholarship.brown.edu, the nameserver is the same computer that runs the hosting. You can peek under the hood and see this in action by going to the Websites and Domains tab of your cPanel account and clicking on DNS Settings. DNS stands for Domain Name System and the name server on digitalscholarship.brown.edu gives control to it to identify what should be displayed when someone types in your domain. Consider the fact that you might have one or more subdomains in your account. The name server and DNS are able to identify those subdomains and let the world wide web know that they exist and point to some files/folders on a computer somewhere.
When you signed up for a domain through the digitalscholarship.brown.edu system your nameservers were chosen for you. So when people type in your address, the server responds with information about your account. When you migrate an account away from one hosting platform like digitalscholarship.brown.edu and onto a new service, it will require you to change the nameservers so that your domain name points to a new server with its own files and structure. It’s also possible to have subdomains that point to entirely different servers than digitalscholarship.brown.edu. For example, you could have a subdomain that looks to Tumblr for files.
