Domain Name and its Working

Domain Name and its Working

When you start thinking of building your own Website, the first name that came to your mind is Domain. Building an internet website are often confusing, especially for beginners. Beginners often ask us: what’s a Domain Name and and the way do domains work? Being a beginner, it’s very confusing to differ between a Domain name, Website or Website Hosting Service. If you are just starting up, then you will find it very difficult to understand the meaning of these parts and their work.

In this article, you will find answers to all of your questions related to Domain Name and its working. The goal of this article is to spread the knowledge about Domain Name and its working to the beginners. Let’s get started.

What is a Domain Name?

Let’s start with the basics, “What is a Domain name?”. Let us suppose your Website is your home then the Domain Name of your Website is your Home’s Address. For example, “www.Google.com" is the address for Google. It is the address people type in the browser’s URL bar to reach your Website.

Some examples of Domain Names we all use in our daily life are

google.com
facebooke.com
twitter.com
wikipedia.com
yahoo.com

Let’s understand the technical explanation of Domain Name: the internet is a vast structure of computers connected to every other through a worldwide network of cables. Just like a house address every computer in the world is assigned with an IP address. The IP address helps us to determine the address of a computer. An IP address is a series of numbers segregated by “dots”. An IP address looks like:

102.66.77.20

So to reach a Website or Webpage, you need to enter the IP address associated with that webpage or Website but in real life, it is not possible to remember all the IP addresses for all the websites. To reduce the burden of remembering so many IP addresses, Domain Names were invented. Instead of typing a long string to visit your desired Website you just need to enter the Domain Name in the URL bar, like blogger.com. 

So now you understand what a Domain Name is, let’s understand the work of a Domain Name. 

How a Domain Name work?

In order to visit a Website, a user types the Domain Name in the URL bar of the web browser. The browser sends the same request to the DNS which is known as Domain Name System. DNS is a global network of servers which is used to direct the Host Names into computer-readable IP addresses. As these servers receive your request, these servers search for the same name server linked with the Domain and transmit the request to those name servers.

These name servers are nothing but computers supervised by the Web Hosting companies. The Web Hosting company will direct the request to the computer/ server where your website/ webpage files and data is stored. These computers are named as Web Server. These Web Servers runs on some special software, like Apache, IIS (Microsoft’s Internet Information Servers).

These web servers collect the information or website and send it back to the user browser to view the website data.

Different Parts of a Domain Name

Domain Name is divided into 3 parts as follows:

SubDomain

A subdomain is the first part of a Domain Name. A Domain Name starts with “www” and the “www” part which comes just before the first dot is called Subdomain. Example: www.google.com.

It is a common part of every domain name. This is an optional part of the domain name because in order to visit the Website a user does not need to enter or type the “www” before a domain name in the web browser. 

Second Level Domain

The second part is the name of the website a user wants to visit. In other words, the second part or the name of the website between the 2 dots is known as the second-level domain. Example:”www.Google.com", in this example “Google” is the second-level domain.

Top Level Domain

Top-Level Domain is also referred to as Domain extension. At the end of every Domain Name after the second dot is the Domain Extension. Example: "www.google.com", in this example “.com” is the domain extension. There are hundreds of domain extensions available but “.com”, “.org”, “.net” are the most common domain extension used by website owners.