Users are trying to access the company time card website. They cannot access it by URL, but they can access it by IP address. Which of the following protocols is MOST likely causing this issue?

DNS (Domain Name System) is responsible for resolving human-readable hostnames and URLs to their corresponding IP addresses. When users can reach a site by IP but not by URL, it confirms the network path and the web server are functional, and only the name resolution step is broken. A misconfigured, unreachable, or incorrect DNS server record for the time card site's hostname would cause exactly this symptom.

DHCP assigns IP addresses to hosts on the network; if DHCP were failing, the users would not have a valid IP address and could not connect by IP address either.

HTTPS is the encrypted web communication protocol; a failure here would prevent access both by URL and by IP address, not selectively by URL only.

SFTP is a secure file transfer protocol and is unrelated to accessing a website by URL or IP address in a browser.