The use of a domain name is for both web pages and email addresses. For example the URL "http://www.domainnamesgb.com" contains the domain name domainnamesgb.com, as does the e-mail address "sales@domainnamesgb.com."
Domain names were created to offer a more rational way to label and locate web sites. Before the use of domain names computers on the Internet were identified by a unique number called an IP address, for example the domain name businessserve.co.uk refers to the web server that has the IP address 62.69.64.41. IP addresses are not very easy to remember nor do they represent any geographical location. Each domain name is associated with an IP address and this association is held on a Domain Name Server (DNS). Each time you use a domain name as an email or a web address you are requesting a DNS to convert the domain name into an IP address for a computer to read. Each domain name has a domain name server that handles its requests.
The domain name system is a database of billions of IP addresses and domain names, with millions of people making hundreds of requests on a daily basis. This database is updated every day with changing IP addresses and domain names, and newly registered domain names.
As emphasised above it would be very difficult to remember websites by their IP address, which is why domain names were created. Domain names are made up of sections called levels; the top-level domain can be identified as the .com part of the name. There're hundreds of top-level domains including, .uk, .org, .gov, & .net. The second-level domain refers to the descriptive part e.g. your company name or domainnamesgb. The third-level domain refers to the www part of the domain name, it can also be known as a sub-domain with the most common being www.
The importance of not having duplicate domain names is so great there has to be a single registry that regulates a list certain top-level domain names. For example, Nominet is the official registry of .uk top-level domains. You can register a domain name with a large number of UK registrars, but each one will collaborate with Nominet to update this list. Nominet holds information about the owner and domain name server of each domain in a database (this is called the whois database). There are others registries for other top-level domains, for example .co, .fr, .de, .es etc.
When you enter a domain name into your browser, the browser needs the IP address and host name to find the address of the web server that hosts the site. To do this your browser must communicate with a domain name server to make the request. Once a domain name server receives a request it can do one of three actions; it can reply with the IP address & host name (if it knows it), it can request the information from another domain name server (this can happen multiple times), or reply with an error message because the domain name is incorrect. Once the browser has the IP address it can contact the web server, which holds the web pages you wish to view.
For more details on our products and services, see below:
