What is a domain name anyway?

By Meagan Carlesso

Essential to the internet. But what exactly is a domain name?

A domain name is the address you type into your web browser to find websites - like "google.com" or "wikipedia.org".

It's essentially a user-friendly way to identify websites. It is much easier to remember a phrase or word, like "amazon.com" than the string of seemingly random numbers that your browser uses under the hood.

Why should we care?

Domain names allow us to connect brand identity, marketing, accessibility, and control to businesses and content. Aligning a domain name to a business' branding and identity helps build trust and increase brand recognition.

How does it work?

Let's look at a a common, simple example domain name "www.example.com". This example has 3 main parts:

Top-level domain (TLD): The last part after the dot (like com, org, edu). This is the "com" in our example.
Second-level domain: The main part of the name (like "google" in google.com). This is the brandable part! In this case, it is simply "example".
Optional subdomains: Subdomains come before the main domain (like "mail" in mail.google.com) and are useful for segmenting features or discrete areas of a website. "www" is a common subdomain used for the home or main page.

Domain names can get much more complicated - considerations like country-code TLDs, effective TLDs and internationalized domain names mean that domain brand-ability is a deep rabbit hole, but we'll cover these in another article!

Did you know that emoji domains like 😎.com are valid domain names?

While domain names are memorable and easy to type, they are solely for our benefit. Devices use identifiers called IP addresses to locate and communicate with each other.

If your device is not using domain names to serve web results, how does your browser return the right address from a domain name?

1 - User types a Domain name

It all starts when you type a domain name, like "www.example.com" into your browser.

2 - Request sent to DNS

Once you press enter, the browser contacts the Domain Name System (DNS for short) to translate our human-readable domain name into an IP address.

**DNS** is a global directory of domain names and their corresponding IP addresses.
If IP addresses are like phone numbers, the DNS is like a phone book!

3 - DNS Resolution

To complete the translation process, the browser checks different DNS servers in a specific order to try to resolve the address. Ultimately, this process should return a valid IP address for routing.

4 - Browser connects to the server

Now that the browser has the IP address, it can find and connect to the right web server.

5 - Website files are served

The server then sends back all the files required for the browser to display the webpage.

Thats it! Domain names help bridge the gap between user-friendly, readable input and efficient computer lookup.

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