When someone starts thinking about making a website, one of the first things that confuse them is when they hear the word domain. They’ve probably never heard the word before and don’t know what it means.
Beginners get the term domain mixed up with a website or web hosting and that’s okay.
In this guide, we will answer the question of what is a domain name and how they work. This can sound all too technical, but it really does help reading a guide like this to understand and get you on the right path.
Let’s start from the very basics.
What Is A Domain Name?
A domain name is the name of the site that you put in the URL bar. It’s more commonly talked about as an address. Think about a house, the address is the place you go to get there. A domain name is just the address to a website.
If you want a more technical explanation, the internet is made up of more than a billion websites. Each web page and computer needs to be able to communicate with one another.
You might know that your computer and every computer in the world has an IP address. This is a series of numbers that identifies a computer on the internet.
Now, just like computers, websites are identified by IP addresses. Imagine having to enter certain numbers to log in to our Facebook or search Google every time.
Domain names were created to allow us to access sites easily.
How do Domains Work?
Domain names are important because they allow computers the ability to find the server a website is hosted on. The server then sends a signal to your computer, allowing you to access whatever site you type in.
When you type in a domain name in the browser, it actually sents a request to a network of servers called the Domain Name System also known as ICANN. These servers look up the domain in their records and send the request that you’re looking for their site.
This is where a hosting company comes in, which we will talk about in a little bit. The hosting company then allows the name servers to access the data stored by your website.
This data then gets sent back to whatever web browser you’re searching on to be able to translate it into the interface that you see on your computer or phone.
Difference Between Domain, Website, and Web Hosting
Let’s start with a website. A website is a place you go to get information or entertainment on the web. It is made up of code like HTML and CSS and contains the images and words that you see on a screen like you’re reading now.
We mentioned earlier that a domain name is like the address for your house. Hosting is like the platform your house is on top of. You can imagine as your House space.
Let’s say you have a 1000 sqft house situated in the xyz street. Here, 1000 sqft can be imagined as hosting (which provides you the option to host your website files like images, plugins, and content) and xyz street can be imagined as the domain name (eg mythemeshop.com).
Hosting
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This article was written by MyThemeShop Editorial Team and originally published on Blog – MyThemeShop.