A domain name is the name of a website eg. www.yahoo.com . Before you obtain this name as an internet address, there are some stages you will have to go through.

First, think of a name, about three of them. Then check if it is available. The internet does not allow coincidence of names so if the name you want has been chosen by somebody else, you cannot have. Why is it so? Assuming, there are two websites on the internet called www.yahoo.com and another is called www.yahoo.comwhich is operated by different companies. If a surfer goes to the net and types www.yahoo.com, which one should be shown to the visitor? Or assume Volunteers of America and Voice of America have the same website acronym www.voa.com. Will you feel comfortable if you want Voice of America and Volunteers of American pops up on the screen? For this conflict to be avoided there should be only one instance of a domain name. Additionally, one single body should be responsible for maintaining a database of these names so it can be sure that no one else had registered this name.

Now there are a lot of domain names but they all have the basic parts. We have the name of the domain , say yahoo and the .com is the tld or top level domain. The tld describes the type of entity the domain is. So .com stands for commercial., .net stands for network,, . info stands for information, .org stands for organization, .edu stands for education., .ac stands for academic etc. There are country domains too like .jp for Japan, .

When you register a domain name, actually you are obtaining an IP address which is numeric in nature. A typical IP address is 192.168.10.1 But humans can remember names better than number so there is a machine that translates this number into a name like www.yahoo.com. If you need the site, you do not type the number but the name. Also, companies will have to be identified by their unique names so numbers will not serve a good purpose.

Organizational identity is a very important feature in domain name registration, and that is why some domains may have to be reserved for certain reasons. For example, www.usarmy.gov is a specialized domain and there is only one such organization in the world. So a name like this may have to be reserved. Otherwise, somebody can register this name and make it unavailable when the US government, the rightful owner, wants it. Should a name be insincerely so obtained, we say the one has registered the name in bad faith. There are checks over this kind of activity.

The body responsible for the registration of domain names is called ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers). ICANN has a number of accredited agents or registrars who register various types of domains on its behalf.

After you register the name , your details are kept on a server. So users can access your web pages through that address. So if anyone types your website address,. the browser sends a request to the server holding your details, then the web page is fetched for you.

When you change a hosting service, you will have to provide your new host with technical details relating to where your domain name is located. The reason is that, your website name, say www.you.com will have to be matched to your numeric name (remember) residing on a server at where you registered your domain. We call this domain transfer.

If you register a new domain, it will take about 72 hours to become available on the entire internet. This is because the “news” of the registration will have to broadcast across the net gradually. As you await this broadcast, which is technically called propagation, you will be given the machine address of your website so you can access it. Normally, after registration, the sign “under Construction” will be put there awaiting full content.

A domain name will expire after the length of period you bought it for.. Actually we rent domain names, we don’t buy. So it is important to renew it. If you don’t, the name will become available after expiry and someone else can buy it.

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