Understanding Domain Names – What Are They And For What Use They Comes In Existence?

By The Editorial Team in Domain Names 2 Comments

While, when one consider on developing a website, it’s not all about or all BUT ends at programming. In actual, it’s more than that. The process of making a website starts with selecting a domain name. Yes, I just mentioned a word “DOMAIN NAME” – What are they? And, for what use they comes in existence.

Questions certainly are many BUT the base answer is one – only one – think of an example that there is numerous population in the planet in which we live BUT unless and until each of humans got their names, can’t be identified. Similar way, domain names are used to identify one of more IP addresses.

Say, counting on an example here, the domain name howtowebdesign.org represents set of IP addresses. The art of domain names are nothing but in actual are used in URLs to identify particular web pages. Another example here, in the URL, https://howtowebdesign.org/index.html, the domain name is howtowebdesign.org.

Also a key point here, which needs to be understand that every domain name has a suffix which indicates that which top level domain (TLD) it belong to. For example, .com, .net, .org and many others while in our case, for howtowebdesign.org, it is .org top level domain name selected as the web is based on IP addresses and not only domain names and result of which every web server requires a Domain Name System (DNS) server to translate domain names into IP addresses.

Some History

The roots of domain names goes back to the era of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) before the world of today’s commercial internet comes into existence. It was all back in 1983 that there was a need arise due to the rapid growth of the network which made it impossible to maintain a centrally organized hostname registry and result of which the Domain Name Systems was introduced on the ARPANET and which leads to be published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 882 and RFC 883.

How It All Use In Web Site Hosting

The domain names are a component of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which being used to access web sites, say for example:

  • URL: http://www.example.net/index.html
  • Top-level domain name: net
  • Second-level domain name: example.net
  • Host name: www.example.net

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