What is a domain name?

What is a domain name?

A domain name is also called the URL or web site address. This is the unique name that your customers will type into a browser to access your web site information. No other person or company will have the same address as you.

URL is an acronym that stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Technically, a URL is an addressing construct used for identifying and locating computers on the Internet. While computers use Internet Protocol (IP) numbers to locate each other on the Internet, people find them hard to remember. Therefore, Web Addresses were developed to permit the use of easily remembered words and phrases to identify Internet addresses. 
For example, the web address gkg.net represents the company GKG. When you type GKG.NET in a web browser or send e-mail to someone at GKG.NET, the Domain Name System (DNS) translates gkg.net into the IP numbers used by the Internet and connects you to GKG.
Think of it as a networked extension of the standard filename concept: not only can you point to a file in a directory, but that file and that directory can exist on any machine on the network, can be served via any of several different methods, and might not even be something as simple as a file: URLs can also point to queries, documents stored deep within databases, the results of a finger or archie command, or a myriad of other items.

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