l’m going to differentiate domain name and URL in this post and tell you little about how you can obtain a name to represent you on the web . In the wake of the internet, computers(servers) are assigned some numbers which are called IP(Internet Protocol) address. It is very hard to remember those numbers so the idea to attach names to those IP addresses to make it simple for human beings evolved. With these idea and the internet, companies, individuals, organizations, business etc can acquire a name for them and create a website to represent them. Now, in other to acquire that name, you must apply through some handful of companies called REGISTRARS that are appointed by ICANN( Internet corporation for assigned names and numbers). Example of companies that are registrars are Goddady.com, hostgator.com etc. You contact the registrar and ask for a name to represent you on the internet and they will create an account for that name if it’s not already taken. If it’s taken, you can make alternate names to represent yourself. This name is stored in a national database maintained by interNIC(internet network information center) and will be for only you as far as you pay the monthly or yearly dues to maintain it in the database. This is called a domain name. For example, if you choose dog as your name and purchase a dot com domain name, dog.com is your domain name. There are different types of suffix names you can purchase for your domain name. We have .com, .net, .biz, .org, .tv, .mobi etc. The most popular is of course the dot com name simply meaning a commercial domain name. If you choose a name to register and someone already has a dot com name for it, you can still obtain a dot net or any other type of domain if it’s available but you have to make sure they can easily by associated with the type of site you are building on your domain. Someone will ask why can’t I decide to make a new ending for my domain? example .jesus or .satan. well, no, you can’t do that at this time but if you are really very rich, l learnt something like that will be happening soon. That means, you’ll be paying huge money to maintain a domain name type which you can also sell to others. Ok, let’s go on, after you’ve purchased your domain name from the registrar, you’ll be given instructions about how to log onto the server of your registrar and access your domain name and it’s features. Depending on which registrar you use, the interface and how to upload or build your website can be frustrating if you are new to this field of technology. Also, as a side note, some companies charge separately for hosting and domain name. Web hosting charge is paying for a disk space on the registrar’s server to store the files of your website. You can purchase the domain name from one company and purchase the web hosting from another but I prefer to have all of them with the same company to make life simple for me. Web Hosting is usually more expensive than the domain name registration. Also, if you haven’t paid to renew any of the above services after your subscription has expired, your files will be deleted from the hosting account and the domain name released to the public, so anyone can use it. For safety reasons, don’t wait for your domain name or web hosting to expire before you try to renew it. Assume you have your domain name and web hosting account ready, you can then build your website and show the whole world what you got. Now, what is URL? It is the short form of Universal resource locator. Don’t let it scare you, it’s simple your domain name extended to point to specific files on your site. For example, 2smart4school.com is my domain name. An example of a URL is 2smart4school.com/game.html. This simply directs the server to go to my domain name and locate the file game.html. The domain name can have sub domains which are like children of the main domain. They are specified with the sub domain name followed by dot then the domain name. Example will be something like blog.yourdomainname.com. Still, you can have URL for sub domains as well to point to specific files on the site. Now, technically when you want to give the home page of your site, which is simply as yourdomainname.com, you can specify it using a URL and that will be yourdomainname.com/. The forward slash is a symbol to tell the computer which directory to go after it and since nothing follows it in this instance, it will remain at yourdomainname.com. Another thing to clarify is http and https that you see on some website. The internet use a protocol or set of rules in navigating resources on the web and this protocol is called hypertext transfer protocol(http). Most sites have http in normal circumstances but others have a secured server so they have https. You’ll mostly see that on eCommerce, bank, government and highly secured websites. The https means the website is secured and data is encrypted before transmitted on the site. There are many companies that sell this type of services and you can find out from the company you register your domain. To purchase it, just ask for SSL(secure sockets layer) and you’ll be able to secure your website too.
