What is a Domain Name? Published: 05 Jan, 2023
A domain name is one of the most crucial elements of any website. And they have a story.
Without domain names, browsing the internet would feel a lot more complicated and building an online presence would be much more difficult.
If you’re planning on building any sort of online presence - whether it’s to display your work for potential employees or to open an eCommerce business - then you'll need to get familiar with the ins and outs of domain names.
Your domain name will impact how likely people are to find your website, and t will also play a massive role in how they perceive you from the get-go, even before they see what you have to offer. Because of all of this you need to learn what is a domain name and how does it works.
Fiste of all: what is a domain name? A domain name is the address people type into a browser in order to reach a site. Much like a fingerprint, each domain name is unique to a specific website and cannot be shared or duplicated with other web pages. Domains were created as a human-friendly way to access the Internet Protocol (IP), which represents a website’s online locator.
An IP address is a string of numbers assigned to every computer, consisting of four decimal numbers ranging from 0 to 255 separated by periods. While these seemingly random series of numbers are great for computers, it’s much easier for humans to use words they can remember. And similar to saving a number on your phone, domain names allow us to save 172.217.3.196 as google.com or 157.240.254.35 as facebook.com
All domain name registrations are overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which allocates and assigns IP addresses, runs accreditation systems for domain registrars and keeps a centralized database of all domain names and their IPs. ICANN also has the authority to approve new domain extensions (also known as TLDs), manage them and shut them down if they don’t follow the determined rules.
It’s important to keep in mind that, while domain names are commonly referred to as URL (Universal Resource Locator) or web address, they’re actually just a crucial part of it. The basic form of a domain name consists of two elements: name and extension. In our case, “dominius” is the name and “.eu” is the extension.
However, if you take a look at your browser’s address bar you’ll notice there are a lot more parts to it, all of which come together to make up this page’s web address.
