Putting a small business online:

  • What is a domain name?

    A Top-level domain groups organizations of a particular type or in a particular geographic location together:

    • .com (for commercial use)
    • .net (also for commercial use, but less common)
    • .org (for organizations that are not for profit)
    • .edu (for education, most commonly four year universities)
    • .mil (for US military)
    • .gov (for US Federal Government and some State Governments)
    • .us (for the geographical location of the United States)
      (Look up the list of country codes here at http://www.iana.org/cctld.html)

       

     

    A name for an organization or other entity is combined with a top level domain to make a second level domain. My consulting business, Meyer Computer Consulting has the secondary domain name:

    meyerconsult.com

    What a domain name does is it allows a machine, or group of machines, to be referred to by a name instead of their Internet addresses (IP Addresses). In the case of my domain, meyerconsult.com, its IP address is:

    192.41.38.165

    Obviously, it is much easier to remember meyerconsult.com than it is to remember that number!

    When people send me e-mail, my domain name is what appears after the @ sign:

    teacher@meyerconsult.com

    The URL for my web site shows that a host name has been combined with my domain name:

    http://www.meyerconsult.com/
    The www is the host name for the machine that is running a web server and is serving up web pages. NOTE: not all web servers have the name www but that is one of the common names.

    When people use FTP to transfer files to me, they use an FTP program such as Fetch or WS_FTP and connect to the address:

    ftp.meyerconsult.com
    The ftp is the host name for the server inside my domain that is allows ftp connections and data transfers.

     

     

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