People, who are not so much into technology or kids who are just starting to explore the Web often asked what is domain name and how does it work? If you are also confused between a domain name, Website, Hosting, and URL then our article may help you to understand these technical terms in a better way.
If you use the internet for any reason you must have to listen to words like websites and domain names. You also often heard from tech-savvy people that you need a domain to make a website for yourself. So
What is a domain name?
A Domain Name is just a string of characters that represent the address of a website that people type in the address bar or URL bar of the browser to visit that particular website.
In very simple words, if the website is a building then its domain name represents the location or address of that building.
Understand it in this Way:
Internet is a huge network of devices or computers connected to each other through cables and wireless networks. Every device on the internet can communicate with each other over this global network. But how can we identify which device is communicating with which? To solve this problem every device is assigned a particular IP address ( which is a special series of numbers that looks like this 192.168.0.1)
Now look at the example of IP address, will it be easy to remember all these numbers in exact specific order? Maybe it is possible for some special people who have a photographic memory but for most of us, it’s very difficult. Imagine what if you have to type these long IP addresses of your favorite website every time you want to visit them Like YouTube ( 207.223.160.0), Facebook ( 69.63.176.0), and many more.
To Solve this problem Domain Names were invented. This makes the process very easy Now you can easily surf between different websites just by typing in the domain Name of Websites in your browser’s URL bar. The Domain Name System is then mapped to the IP address of that Website by global Network of System ( Known by Domain Name System or DNS)
Structure of Domain Name Explained :
As you can see in the image the domain name is usually broken into 2 or 3 parts and each part is separated by a single (.) dot. The correct way of reading any domain name is from left-to-right. Now let’s understand what different parts represent in .domain names. The rightmost part after the last dot in any domain is known as the top-level domain ( TLD in short). This includes the very common TLDs like “.com”, “.org”,”.edu”, “.net” and all country-specific TLDs like “.in”, “.ru”, “.fr”,”au” etc.
In Between or before the top-level domain comes to the second-level domain( SLDs) which is usually the brand, company, keyword, institution, or person’s name. The SLDs make your domain name unique and different from any other Domain Name.
Like in www.exmaple.com, the word example is the second level domain name. So while choosing this name make sure you choose the best one as per your need. You can read our article to know which things you need to consider while picking any domain name for yourself or your Blog.
If there is something left before the second-level domain and transfer protocol ( HTTP) or WWW. Then it is called the third-level domain (3LD).
For Example in https://en.wikipedia.org, after the transfer protocol HTTPS:// the word en. is a third-level domain.