Domain Names
Details - Frequently Asked Questions - Anecdotes - Links to other
sites
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- Definition
- The domain name is the name that uniquely identifies organisations on the
Internet. For example ual.com is the domain name of United Airlines and royal.gov.uk
is the domain name of the British Royal family.
- Discussion
- The domain name is used to identify the web site of organisations and the email address
of people in the organisation. So for example:
| The domain name of the HyperGlossary is |
hyperglossary.co.uk |
| The web address of the HyperGlossary is |
http://www.hyperglossary.co.uk |
| My email address is |
John@hyperglossary.co.uk |
| The domain name of New Media in Business is |
nmib.com |
- Once an organisation owns a domain name they usually add "www." to the front
of it to give their Web address. If they want a another web site they choose a different
string in place of www. So for example www.netscape.com, home.netscape.com and
guide.netscape.com are all Web sites owned by Netscape. Having registered
"netscape.com" they can have as many different web sites as they like ending in
that string.
- See Also
- URLs - the mechanism for specifying web site addresses that
incorporates the domain name - "http:/www." and all that!
- More Details (sometimes Technical)
- The part of the domain name after the final dot ("com" and
"uk" in the above examples) is called the top level domain name. It is
either a country code (such as "uk" for
the United Kingdom) or a global code (such as
"com" for international or US commercial organisations). Some countries, such as
the UK, have subcategories (such as "co.uk" for UK
companies).
- Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I register a Domain Name? The normal way is to use an Internet Service Provider. There are also some organisations that
specialise in registering domain names and providing a minimal Web site until you have got
your own Web site set up. We used Netnames to register nmib.com.
- How do I choose a Domain Name? Decide how you want your company or
organisation to be perceived - a UK company, an international organisation, etc. Then
choose a name that best represents your company or organisation. If the name is long
you might well want to choose an abbreviation. It should however be something that is
obvious to the users - peculiar spelling will result in users mistyping it and failing to
find your site. When you have decided check whether it is already taken (Netnames allows
you to check this for yourself). If your first choice of name is already taken try your
second choice and so on.
- How many domain names have been registered? Lost time I looked there
were over 8,000,000. More than half were .com. There were about 400,000 German (.de)
domains and about 300,000 British (.uk) domains. A count is
maintained by Netnames and updated on a daily basis.
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- Anecdotes
- Not so long ago enterprising individuals reserved the best domain names and tried to
sell them to rich organisations. It is a lot harder to make money out of this now because
most of the large organisations have recognised the significance of the Internet and
reserved all the names they might need. Furthermore companies are now winning court cases
against such individuals on the basis of having a prior right to the name based on
registered trademarks.
- Links to other sites
- http://www.domainnames.co.uk/search.html
- a site for checking if the domain name you want is already in use
- http://www.nominet.org.uk/ - the body which
allocates UK domain names
- http://www.domainstats.com/
- number of domain registered
- http://www.nic.uk/rules.html - rules for .uk
domain names
- http://www.netnames.com - Netnames who I
registered my domain name with
- www.domainnames.co.uk - another site for registering domain names
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© New Media in Business Ltd 1997-2000
Last updated: 12 May 2000