Beginners often ask us: What are domains and how do domains work? If you are a beginner, you may have heard that you need a domain to create a website.
However, many beginners confuse a domain name with a website or a website hosting service. If you're just starting out, all these different terms may seem overly technical. In this beginner's guide, we'll answer what a domain is and how domains work. The aim is to help you understand and choose the right domain name for your website.
What's Domain name?
The domain name is the address of your website that people type in the URL bar of their browser to access your website.
Simply put, if your website were a house, your domain name would be its address. More detailed explanation:
The Internet is a huge network of computers connected to each other by a worldwide network of cables. Each computer in this network can communicate with other computers.
To identify them, each computer is assigned an IP address. It is a sequence of numbers that identifies a particular computer on the Internet. A typical IP address looks like this:
66,249.66.1
Now, an IP address like this is pretty hard to remember. Imagine if you had to use such numbers to access your favorite websites.
Domain names were invented to solve this problem.
Now, if you want to visit a website, you don't have to enter a long string of numbers.
Instead, you can access it by typing the easy-to-remember domain name in your browser's address bar.
How do domains actually work?
To understand how a domain name actually works, let's see what happens when you type it into your browser.
When you enter a domain name into your web browser, it first sends a request to a worldwide network of servers that form the "DNS" domain name system.
These servers then look up the name servers or DNS servers associated with the domain and forward the request to those name servers.
These name servers are computers managed by your server. Your hosting provider will forward your request to the computer hosting your website. This computer is called a web server. Special software is installed (Apache and Nginx are two popular web server software).
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