The Format Of A Domain Name
Like a physical address, Internet domain names are heirachical (only a little more strict), so while your address might look like:
| House name: | 3 Willow Walk |
| Town: | Trumpton |
| County: | Trumptonshire |
| Country: | England |
An Internet domain name looks like:
| Host name: | www |
| Domain: | gondolin |
| Second level domain: | org |
| Top-level domain: | uk |
As with physical addresses, the exact layout can change. Sometimes there will be more parts to the address, so in the same way that houses can be divided into flats, domains can be divided into subdomains (there could be a domain name like "www.testing.gondolin.org.uk" for example). Sometimes there will be fewer parts - typically the larger the organisation, the shorter their domain name, ibm.com for example.
There are only a few top-level domains and creation of new ones tends to cause a lot of arguments. The main ones are:
- com
- org
- net
- Country codes (fr for France, it for Italy, uk for Britain, etc.)
Useless trivia: The "uk" country code should be Ukraine and Britain should be using "gb", but for historical reasons Britain uses "uk" (United Kingdon) and Ukraine ended up with "ua".
Second level domains aren't quite so restricted (you can have pretty much whatever you like under "com", "org" or "net"), although typically each country has its own version of "com", "org" and "net" and the actual domain lives under that.
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