What is a domain name

There are two types of "Domain" Names, which can get confused. Usually the term refers to an Internet Domain Name, but sometimes can refer to a Windows NT Domain Name.

Internet Domain Name

Internet Domain Names were developed as a way to easily identify servers on the Internet. When the Internet first started these domain names, and their related IP Addresses, were all saved in a single file (called a hosts file. There is still one on every computer) that resided on every single computer on the Internet. This was fine when there were only a handful of computers, but by the time the number of servers reached the thousands, keeping these files in sync rapidly became a nightmare.

In order to make the management of these host names easier, a distributed name serving system was developed. This became known as DNS. Looking up information in this database is one of the reasons we have the dots in domain names.

Every dot in a domain name is a level separator. Reading from right to left, we have what is refered to as the Top Level Domain, or TLD. This is, for example, the .com or .uk of your domain name. When a computer is trying to contact your web server, the first lookup is the TLD. This then refers your computer to the next naming server down the tree, until it reaches the last level which should have the IP address of the server in question.

TLD's were given to every country in the world, and because national TLD's are all two letters (.uk, .us), some interesting coincidences appeared. For example, .tv has nothing to to with television. It is, in fact, the national TLD for the Tuvalu islands. The 6000 or so islanders have turned this coincidence into a cash crop. Just as well because the highest point on the islands is only 5m above see level.

There are also a number of non-geographical top level domain names. The best known of these are .com and .org. You can see a full list of TLD's here.

When you acquire a domain name you do not own it. It is more like a lease. It can be taken away from you if you are infringing someone's intellectual property, or abuse the Internet by sending spam, or hosting web sites with illegal content. Every TLD registry has it's own terms and conditions. Nominet, who manage the .uk namespace, has theirs here.

Under your domain name you can have any number of sub domains. Even sub domains can have sub domains. Technically there is no limit to the number of host names and sub domains you can have of your domain name, until you reach the maximum host name length (which has evolved from 64 to 255 characters, and has recently been reviewed again to allow non-latin character sets).

Using the host name of the server you are using to view this page (www.uk.forgetaboutit.net) as an example, .net is the TLD, and we are the registrant of the .forgetaboutit part. We have then created a .uk subdomain so that we could have separate websites for separate countries (or languages) at some point in the future. The final part, www is the name of the server. By tradition, www has become the default host name for a web site, just like mail has become the default name for a mail server.

To break it down further, the http: bit in front of the domain name tells the browser what protocol to use (in this case HTTP) to download the file, followed by two // to indicate that what follows is a host name and the bit after the domain name (from the first single / is the navigation down though the folders to the file (see here for more info).

Windows NT Domain Name

A Windows NT Domain is a collection of Windows based computers that have been gathered together for a common purpose within a Windows network. In its simplest form it is the name of the Workgroup you assign when you set up the networking, to allow to you to easily browse the network in the old Network Neighbourhood in Windows98. but at the other extreme it is a very complex security system that allows tightly controlled access to network resources, using a centralised permissions database. It is unfortunate that Microsoft chose to use this word as it has caused a lot of confusion over the years. It is further complicated by the fact that newer versions of Windows can use a real Internet Domain name as a Windows Domain Name, although most use a sub domain such as office or local to avoid problems.