Introduction
When researching how to build your new website, you inevitably run into talk about domain names and probably wonder what they are, what they have to do with a website, and why you need one.
You may never need to deeply understand these pieces of the internet puzzle because hosting providers do a solid job at taking care of this for you.
Still, it can be helpful to understand what it means to purchase a domain name and how it relates to hosting your website.
This article doesn't go into tedious detail about domain names; it provides a cursory overview to help people understand the basic concept and how it relates to websites.
What is a domain name?
At its most basic definition, a domain name is a unique set of characters that helps you and others identify services you own and control on a network. For the sake of this article, the network we're referring to will be the Internet.
You will most commonly see a domain name reflecting the name of the business or service, but in reality, it can be any set of random characters.
Examples of domain names are:
- customcodeit.com.au
- facebook.com
- google.com
Why do we use domain names?
Here's a quick exercise: List out the people you know in your head. It's pretty easy to name a whole bunch of people, right?
Now, list out those people's phone numbers. That's considerably harder!
It's much easier to commit a name to memory than a number, so think of your domain name as names in a phone book. You don't have to know a person's phone number; you just look up their name, and your phone handles the rest.
Behind the scenes, a domain name resolves to an IP address that identifies a device on a network (in simple terms).
An example of an IP address could be:
- 208.67.220.220
- 2606:4700:4700::1111
To summarise, it's much easier to tell someone: "Just go to google.com" instead of "Just go to 142.251.46.174 or 2607:f8b0:4005:80c::200e"
How do I register a domain name?
To purchase and register a domain name, you need to go through a domain registrar.
A domain registrar provides a mechanism for leasing a domain and typically also offers tools for linking IP addresses to domain names (and often more).
Some good domain registrars are:
- Cloudflare
- Hover
- VentraIP
There are many to choose from, and they all differ in price, features, and services. There is typically no lock-in, and you can move your domain names between different registrars as needed.
How are domain names and websites connected?
A website is nothing more than some code that lives on a server (essentially a computer) somewhere in the world. This server has an IP address assigned to it, which is hard to remember.
Looking at our previous phonebook example, it would be much easier to tell everyone about our website with an easy-to-remember name and not a jumble of numbers.
By pointing our domain name at the IP address of the server that our website lives on, we have eliminated the need to remember the IP address of our server.
Just like phone numbers, IP addresses can change. Imagine the headache of telling everyone on the internet that the IP address to your amazing resources has now changed.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this answers some of your questions about the connections between domain names and websites.
This article is a very high-level overview of what is otherwise quite a complicated topic.
If it interests you, I would highly recommend digging deeper to understand some of the concepts at a more fundamental level.
As always, if you need IT support, a website, or software, contact us!