Delegation is the process of identifying the name servers that have records on the location of the computer your domain name is hosted on.

Think of a domain name as a book in a library. How do you find out which shelf to go to so that you can get the book you want? You ask the librarian. Name servers are like librarians; they hold and seek out information about where to locate a particular domain name in the biggest of all libraries, the Internet.

Computers only recognise and find each other via a set of numbers called IP addresses (example 102.205.33.65). For a computer to find a web site on the Internet, a domain name such as internetnamesww.com needs to be translated into a numerical IP address and vice versa. The computers that perform these translations are called name servers.

Hence for a domain name to function and point to your web site, it first needs to be delegated to point to a name server. The name server will then have information about where the files for the web site are stored and will "guide" your web browser to the location of your home page.

Your hosting provider can tell you what name servers you will need to delegate your domain name to. They will take care of ensuring that the name servers are correctly configured.