What is a Domain Name? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Using a Domain Name is how users on the internet are able to access and exchange information. Your website (collection of information pages) is a storage location on the net which has an IP (Internet Protocol) address, this address is how you and site visitors access your stored information (website). Since numbers (IP) are a bit inconvenient to recall we provide that location a name called a domain name. Each and every domain name gets a special IP address associated with it, computers communicate using this number, humans use domain names.
A domain name takes the format; www.learnweb101.com, where as an IP address is a series of numbers such as; 72.161.131.223. Since it is not practical (we have a hard enough time remembering our children and spouses birth dates) for humans to speak in the computer lingo we attach a name to the number so it becomes easier and practical for us.
The first step towards building any website and having a web presence either for your business, a sports club, an information site or just-for-fun website is to register a domain. This provides you with a location (IP address) on the World Wide Web. In order to use that space for information exchange (website), you will have to find a host for your site and your host will link your domain to that website location.
Every domain name can have one of many suffixes or extension associated with it; these are called TLD (Top Level Domains) are also referred as genericTLD (gTLD), some of these TLD's are;
These are just a few of the most common Top Level Domains, others you may see from time to time are .mobi .int .jobs .mil etc. Some generic TLD'S are restricted such as .gov for government use.
Then you have the country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD), these only have 2 character extension and many of them are restricted to companies, organizations or individuals that have a presence within that country such as; .ca for Canada, .ie Republic of Ireland etc. Here are a few country TLD's:
It is a really good idea to register the domain name using your country's TLD (as well as the other genericTLD), especially if your presence is only going to be local. For instance; if you are conducting business locally and your products or services (let's say you are an electrician ) would only be sold with a given geographic region, then country TLD is great. It gives your customers and site visitors more trust in your company since they realize that you have local representation.
Initially, users chose .com exclusively as their only domain extension, but now more of them are realizing the essence of registering their country's TLD as well. If you register a ccTLD together with .com and .net, and your business is locally based; I would make your primary domain on the hosting site the ccTLD, and the other ones (.com & .net in this instance) point to the ccTLD extension. More of that in later chapters.
Many also suggest that one should register all sorts of different combinations of your original domain name; for example if I register learnweb101.com then I should also register misspellings such as; lernweb101, learnweb1o1,laernweb101 etc. I am not sure I agree with this strategy, as it would not only cost a fortune but get you totally paranoid. So forget it.
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