What is a Domain Name?
A domain name is your website’s equivalent of a physical address. Where you would use a company’s street address to find their offices, a domain name is how you would find a company’s website.
Without a domain name, you would need to remember the server you wish to visit the specific IP address. This could either be in an IPv4 format or the newer IPv6 format, which look as follows:
- IPv4 – 172.16.254.1
- IPv6 – 2001:db8:0:1234:0:567:8:1
As you can see, it is much easier to remember www.thewebmaster.com than one of the IP addresses above.
A domain name consists of two main elements; the website’s name and the domain name extension. Using our website as an example, “thewebmaster” is the website name, and “.com” is the domain name extension.
The www part is the subdomain. Historically, people used www to symbolize the World Wide Web. Today, people use various subdomains; for example, the blog subdomain may host a companies blog or staging may be used by developers to host a development version of your website.