What is a Domain Name?
A domain name is a text code like www.example.com. In a URL, such as https://www.example.com/category/article, you have 3 parts: https which is the protocol, www.example.com which is the domain name, and /category/article, which is the path. The domain name is used by a web browser to identify which server on the Internet it should connect to.
Domain names themselves can be split into several parts. For www.example.com, we say com is the Top Level Domain (TLD), example is the second-level domain, and www is the subdomain.
Technically, www.example.com and example.com are different domain names, and they could be completely different websites. In this case, we call the domain name without a subdomain the root domain.
Some websites have multiple subdomains, e.g. Reddit has www.reddit.com for its normal website, and old.reddit.com for its old design. Some websites provide a subdomain for each one of its users, such as Tumblr.
What are Domain Names For?
In order to connect to a computer on the Internet, it's necessary to know its IP address, which is a code full of numbers. Domain names are used instead of IP addresses so you don't need to know the server's IP in order to connect to it.
When you try to access www.example.com, your computer connects to a server called a Domain Name Server (DNS), and asks it what's the IP address of www.example.com. The DNS tells your computer the IP address of www.example.com, and then the computer connects to that IP address to access the website's server.
Domain names can also be used for servers that don't host websites, such as servers that host online video-games.
Domain names are also useful because the IP address of website can change over time. For example, if web servers physically move from one place to another in the planet, the IP address will be different.
By the way, if you're wondering how your computer knows the IP address of the DNS servers to connect to them, this information is acquired automatically by your modem/router from your ISP's DHCP's server when you connect to the Internet.
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