What is a Domain Name?

Put simply, a Domain Name is just a simple way to allow people to remember the name of your website, so they can find it easily (and hopefully return often!). When you type www.somecompany.com into a browser's address bar, you're using a Domain Name to locate a computer (and the web pages sitting on it) out there somewhere.

A Human's Point of View:

We humans are quite good at remembering certain things. A word, or group of words, that relates to something important to us, is easy to remember. For example, the Eiffel Tower — that's a name you'll still remember in 10 years, without any effort.

People (well, most anyway!) are quite terrible at remembering numbers. Apart from a few like your birthday, or current phone number, most people can't keep a number in their head for more than a few minutes.

So for us, we prefer to have a nice name to remember, over some vague number. Google, Apple, The Times, Joe's German Bakery — perfect for us!

A Computer's Point of View:

Computers on the other hand, much prefer to work with numbers. It's their language and what they do best.

Computers that are connected to the Internet use numbers to communicate with each other. These numbers are called an IP Address, and look something like the following examples:

• 208.77.188.166
• 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8

Each of these numbers is unique, and is how a computer "knows" where to look for something on the Internet — you can think of them as a house address for the Internet. As you can see, if we poor humans had to remember these numbers to find anything on the Internet, we probably just wouldn't bother in the first place. That's where Domain Names come in — they are the bridge between what people and computers prefer to use to find things.

How a Domain Name Works

So when we type www.google.com into our web browser, we're really just telling the computer to go look up the IP Address that is listed for google.com and then go find that computer (and send us back a web page to look at).

1. You type a Domain Name into your Web Browser (in this example, www.google.com)
2. The Domain Name is sent to a special computer on the Internet, called a Name Server, who's job is to look up the IP Address for the Domain Name
3. The computer at that IP Address then responds to the request you made (in this case, sending you a web page)
4. Your Web Browser receives the requested information and displays the page for you to view
   

As is usually the case with geeky things, this is a major simplification — there are a ton of details and uses for Domain Names and IP Addresses that go far beyond the scope of this article, but for the most part, this explanation should serve you well.

Getting a Domain Name for your Website

There are two aspects to getting a Domain Name for your website project. The first is to find a relevant name. This will probably require a fair amount of thought and research (especially for .com Domain Names, as most of the good and easy ones were taken long ago). The second is to register the Domain Name with a reputable company. See the links section at the end of this article to check to see if a Domain Name is available.

Finding a Good Domain Name for your Project

Finding a good name for your website can either be a short and simple project, or might require many days of research and hard thinking — it all depends on what your goals are for the project.

If you are putting together a simple website, that you don't expect to be earning a living from or that you don't think will attract many viewers over its life-time, you probably can just use the first name that pops into your head, that you find interesting and is not already registered by someone else.

If, on the other hand, your website is part of what you do to earn your living, then you should spend some time researching the various aspects of choosing a good Domain Name. Search engines (such as Google) view Domain Names as one of the most important aspects when deciding if your website should be shown for someone's specific search and is an important part of what is called Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) — or in other words, "making your website easy to find".

For example, if your name is Mark and you are setting up a website that to sell antique English books, you will definitely do better with a domain name such as www.antique-english-books.co.uk, than you would with www.markspages.co.uk.

If you think that your website is going to be an important part of (or all of!) your business, then we recommend that you do some web searching on the subject, and/or purchase a book on the subject — it will be time and money well spent.

Registering your own Domain Name

Once you've found a Domain Name that you feel suits your project, you will need to register it with a company called a Domain Registrar. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of companies offering this service, and it can be tricky to know with who you should trust this important aspect to. There are two ways you can go about registering a Domain Name, either have your Web Hosting company sort it out for you (the easy, riskier way) or register your Domain Name yourself, with a company separate from where you are hosting your website (the slightly harder, safer way).

Often the easiest way to register a Domain Name is when you buy a web hosting package. This usually means the web hosting company will take care of setting up everything for you and can be quite speedy to have up and running. Although this option will likely save you a bit of time and hassle at the beginning, it does have a rather major pit-fall...

...Imagine that you have purchased your Domain Name at the same time as your web hosting, and that all is up and running quickly and easily. Time goes by and you find that you are having lots of problems with the web host — server outages and other issues that are keeping your website off-line and costing you money and stress. What to do? As your Domain Name and Web Hosting are with the same company, you can't just move your web pages to another company's web hosting, without the cooperation of the existing company. In the short history of the web, this has happened many times and many times people have found themselves held "ransom" by a hosting company.

To give yourself the most flexibility and safety, when registering a new Domain Name, we recommend that you use a different company to the one where you are hosting your website. This makes it much simpler to change web hosting companies in the future, for whatever reason, and frees you from the potential to be "held ransom" as described above.

Article Links and other Related Reading:

1. Web Hosting — our article on finding a home for your website project.
2. GoDaddy.com — one of the web's largest Domain Registrars. Often a good choice for registering .com domain names.
3. FreeParking.co.uk — an option for UK based domain names.