Why did clearing my dns cache make my browsers work?

Question

I had been having an issue with my internet the past few weeks that had been driving me crazy. I bought a new computer and while applications like skype and spotify could connect to the net, my browser would often throw up a no connection error.

For days I tried finding the solution (re-installing the driver etc.) and I finally cleared my DNS cache and now I don't seem to be having a problem.

I'm not the techiest guy, but I was curious to know why this worked. What might have happened to my computer that this resolved?

Feel free to go in depth... I don't really know what DNS cache is even or why its useful. Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

DNS is the Domain Name System - tutorial here.

Basically it resolves domain names to IPs. You use domain names, your computer and the internet use IPs.

If every time your browser requested an image or a JS file or a CSS file or anything else on a web page it would request, in some cases, hundreds of times to get the exact same domain name to IP resolution on a single page. Therefore there is a DNS cache where it saves the results of earlier resolutions. If example.com goes to 1.1.1.1 then it knows that and doesn't have to ask again. This eases the load on the nameservers and makes your browsing faster.

If you couldn't connect before and now you can and all you did was clear the DNS cache, then you had a bad solution for either the browsers home page or for the proxy that you're using to connect. This is what the browser tries to connect with when you open it up. The other services you're talking about wouldn't try to make that initial connection.