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Internet Domain Names
The purpose of a domain name is to make it easy to locate a web site.
Generally speaking a web site consists of files that are placed on the hard drive of a computer that has been set up to be accessible via the Internet. If you known the address of the computer you can access the web site.
There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of such computers on the Internet and they are all given a special number (known as an IP address - something like 72.167.174.245) that separates them from any other computer on the Internet. You can type that number in the address bar of your browser and you will see that it will take you to a computer that has a web site.
This number can be likened to the latitude and longitude for a house which would read something like: 39n58, 76w44. However normally you refer to a house by its address - 1 Pennsylvania Avenue, Philadelphia Pa. Similarly you refer to a computer by its "address" - www.netgonian.com. The analogy continues as follows:
Generally speaking a web site consists of files that are placed on the hard drive of a computer that has been set up to be accessible via the Internet. If you known the address of the computer you can access the web site.
There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of such computers on the Internet and they are all given a special number (known as an IP address - something like 72.167.174.245) that separates them from any other computer on the Internet. You can type that number in the address bar of your browser and you will see that it will take you to a computer that has a web site.
This number can be likened to the latitude and longitude for a house which would read something like: 39n58, 76w44. However normally you refer to a house by its address - 1 Pennsylvania Avenue, Philadelphia Pa. Similarly you refer to a computer by its "address" - www.netgonian.com. The analogy continues as follows:
- 1 Pennsylvania Avenue is the house number. WWW is the computer.
- Philadelphia is the name given to a group of locations we call a "county" (Note: liberties are being taken to make this analogy work). Netgonian is the name given to a group of computers, generally owned by the same organization, called a "domain".
- Pa refers to a broader grouping of "counties" known as a "state". Com similarly is a broader grouping of "domains" known as a "top level domain or TLD" ("com" is supposed to represent that the organization that owns the computers that are grouped into a domain is a commercial organization).
So what are you doing when you purchase a domain name? Check out this next article...
