When I received my welcome email from NameCheap Hosting after Lainy paid for it, I was reading it with babynoela. She saw the link to my control panel and was a little bit inquisitive about it.

You may access your control panel at http://65.254.49.210/cpanel or http://azblogging.com/cpanel if your domain has been transferred to our nameservers.

Looking at the above two links, Noela asked

…does it therefore mean azblogging.com is the same as 65.254.49.210?

That’s a very good question and it came right on time when I was planning to put up a post of this nature.

A majority of us are deeply possessed by the web so much that we care less about the little things on which it is built. We should be able to tell someone, even in the layman’s language what certain aspects of blogging, the blogosphere and the entire web are. The most basic of theses things should be domains and hosting.

Lets consider a friend’s url (http://www.scottzprincess.com/). I will be referring to it as an example throughout this post.

Do you understand what http://www.scottzprincess.com/ means? Do you know what a domain name is? What is a URI? Do you know what DNS is? We should be able to answer some very basic questions by the end of this post.

what is a domain name?

In lay terms, a domain name is an internet address by which a web site can be reached. It is a unique address that specifies the location of a website on the World Wide Web. A web site is normally built on a computer and then stored on a server. That server (which of course is also a computer) has an IP Address just like phones have phone numbers. Accessing the stored website through its unique IP address is a little bit difficult since the IP address is a string of numbers and dots which most people find difficult to remember.

This is where domain names come into play. Domain names “replace” the long and difficult to remember strings that can be used to access a website. I put replace in quotes because what a domain name does is that it basically forwards you to the IP address.

What is a URL

A url is the entire web address that contains the domain name.

Scottzprincess.com is a domain name but http://www.scottzprincess.com/ is a URL.
The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the full address of a website.

Now, let’s look at the various building blocks that make up a URL.

Top Level Domain (TDL)

I guess you must have seen TDL many times but never cared about it.
The TDL is the suffix that comes immediately after the dot in the domain name. Popular TDLs include com, net, org, edu.
TDLs are further broken down into generic TDLs (gTDLs), country code TDLs (ccTDLs) and infrastructure TDLs.

Most of the TDLs you are very versed with are generic TDLs. These include com, net, org, edu, gov, mil, int, aero, biz, coop, info, museum, name, pro, etc…

Country code TDLs end with the two letter abbreviation assigned to countries, e.g. uk for the united kingdom, ca for Canada, us for united states…etc

Infrastructure domain names are used for Internet-infrastructure purposes and limited to the government agency which formulated the internet. This agency is called Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

SECOND Level Domain (SDL)

The SDL is the readable part of the domain name. In our example above, this readable part should be scottzprincess.

The subdomain

This is the part that comes before the SDL. In our example above, that should be www

Take special not that a subdomain is very different from a directory.
Consider the following urls
http://www.healthbuff.scottzprincess.com/
http://www.scottzprincess.com/healthbuff

healthbuff in the first url is a subdomain while in the second, it is a directory.

what happens when I type a domain name in a browser

When you enter scottzprincess.com into the address bar of your browser, the computer does a search of the domain name system (DNS). The DNS is a system that converts a domain name into the corresponding IP address. This system is maintained by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The DNS will translate scottzprincess.com into the IP number and your computer will then connect with the blog Our Journey to Forever!

Easy to understand, right?

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