What is a Domain Name, and Why Every Website Needs One?

In the early days of the Internet, for computers to communicate with each other across the network, every computer got a numeric address, and that holds true even today. Every website on the Internet has a numeric address like 67.145.30.229, and we can go to that address.

But you don’t want to have to type in 67.145.30.229 every time you want to go to Facebook.com. We struggle to memorize numbers that long for each site we visit, right?

You don’t want to remember a number like that to get to your favorite restaurant website, vacation destination, or car dealership. You want a name, a word.

For that, domain names were created to equate to a specific numeric (web) address. And frankly, the web still uses those numbers. Underneath all the technology, the entire Internet still works on that numeric system, but because we’re people and not computers, domain names were invented to help us get to where we want to be.

Humans are quite good at remembering words but not so good at remembering strings of numbers, which is why it works to put things on billboards like brickelltravel.com.

You can take a look at it while driving and remember it later on. You would not recognize the IP address for brickelltravel.com.

DNS

Domains are managed by the domain name system or DNS.

When you’re working with websites, you may occasionally hear somebody talk about DNS. They’re talking about is the (DNS) domain name system.

So domain names were invented to help you find your way around the web and get to that numeric address that you want without knowing it.

‘WWW’ is the machine name or hostname and stands for the World Wide Web. It is mostly optional these days. – ‘sjswebdesign’ is the registered domain. – .co.uk is the domain name, and we need to buy it from registrars like GoDaddy, Hostgator, etc.

Inside a Website

All accessible hyperlink web pages form an area called the World Wide Web (WWW).

Now, a collection of hyperlinked pages sharing a common domain name or FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) is called a website.

A group of HTML files forms a website. To have our website visible on the Internet, all files (HTML, CSS, text, images, videos, sounds) should be stored on special computers called servers. For that, we need to buy some disk space on the server from companies to which those servers belong. These companies are called Web Host Companies.

When the website files are uploaded to the server, the web host’s responsibility is to deliver the required files of your website as soon as the server receives a request from a web browser.

This service, that web hosts provide, is called Web Hosting. As a whole, web hosts provide us with servers to store web pages publicly accessible with URLs forming the WWW.

Web pages with common domain names collectively create a website that goes live on the Internet with web hosting services.

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