Understanding Domain Name Registration – History, Administration, Technical Requirements And Process

While the strong need arise first back in 1983 when the Domain Name System was introduced on the ARPANET but the first commercial internet domain name, in the TLD com, was registered on March 15, 1985 by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the name symbolics.com.

The picture goes brighter in 1992, when fewer than 15,000 .com domains had been registered while in December 2009, just in time span of 17 years; over 192 million domain names had been registered while as of March 15, 2010, there was a total of (approximate) 84 million .com domain names registered.

Administration

The domain name registration are delegated by domain name registrars present all around the world, which are accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is an organization which has been charged with looking onto the name and number systems of the internet.

While on second take along with ICANN, each of top-level domain names is maintained and serviced technically by an administrative organization operating a respective registry. Now, where a registry is the one which is being responsible for maintaining the databases of names registered within the TLD it looks onto.

The registry, then receives registration information from each of the domain name registrar which has been authorized to assign names in the corresponding top-level domains and will published the information using WHOIS protocol. The domain name registries maintain the WHOIS information such as registrant, name servers, expiration dates etc.

Technical Requirements And Process: Understanding Terms

Registrars use number of key pieces of information connected with a domain name in the process of registering a new domain name and on maintaining authority over the new name space created.

Administrative Contact: The core of any domain name where a registrant usually designates an administrative contact to manage the one. It contains the highest level of control over a domain which may includes name of record, postal address and contact information of the official registrant of the domain and the obligation to conform to the requirements of the domain registry, which retains the right to use a domain name.

Technical contact: The technical contact keeps an eye as well as manages the name servers of a domain name. The functions include domain name configuration details with the requirements of the domain registry, maintaining the domain zone records and providing name servers continuous functionality.

Billing contact: The billing contact is responsible for receiving billing invoices from the domain name registrar and paying applicable fees.

Name servers: Majority of registrars offers two or more name servers as part of the registration service while a registrant may specify its own authoritative name servers to host a domain’s resource records. On overall contextual, as per traditional RFC 1034 requirements, typically a minimum of two servers is required.