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What is a
Domain Name Exactly?
The advent of the internet brought major
changes in the lifestyle of how people find information
and to society in general. Information is found on Internet 'sites'. Computers use numbers to locate these sites which reside on large numbers of computer servers. People however, are not too good at remembering lots of numbers and prefer real words or addresses to find things. This is where the “domain name” is used as part of
the Internet system. However, despite the fact that many
of the people are using the internet today the term “domain
name” is not that well-understood. Many
were using the internet, surfing to sites on
the web, but it turns out that they are not
aware of the nature of the domain name. So what
then is domain name?
Generally, when we talk about “domain
name”, we are referring to a
distinct or unique name that recognizes a site
on the web. It is then considered to be a
portion of the URL or address of a web site.
The domain name has two major
components, a domain name (e.g. Google) and and domain extension (e.g. .com), and these components are typically
separated by a dot.
For an overview of the nature of a domain
name, I'll give you a full example. One of the common and widely
identified domain names on the web is
www.google.com. The full URL would be
http://www.google.com
I am sure that you are all
familiar with Google, so it is then interesting for you to
comprehend how the URL is made up.
The first part is the protocol, this is how the pages on the website
will be transferred over the Internet, http is one and commonly used for web pages, ftp is another that is used to transfer files that will not be rendered in a web browser. The next part
of the domain name which is the www actually
stands for the host server, that is the World
Wide Web where in the site is found. The third
part then which is google identifies the
company or the organization name, in the example the company is Google. And finally,
the last part which is the .com then mirrors
the type of organization. Generally, this is
known as the “top-level domain
name”.
Talking of “top-level domain
names”, it is very important to know that the most common
top-level domain names used in
the internet comprise .gov which stands for
government agency, .org for an organization,
.edu for education institution, and .net for a
network.
Some Internet gurus have considered that
one of the best and simple trick for locating
companies or organizations on the internet is
to enter the name of the business with the
appropriate top-level domain name extention. So, if the
top-level domain name of a site is .gov or
.org, then you should be aware of the type of organisation, for you
to find the exact location of the site that you
are looking for. If for example, you want to
locate the exact site for World of Flowers, so then
just enter it with the correct domain name
which is www.worldofflowers.com, or if you want to
go for the FBI’s web site which is a government body, then be
aware that the domain name extension for them is .gov so we have
www.fbi.gov. This doesn't always work as some businesses abrieviate their business name to make it easier to type into a browser.
