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This is the first article in the Customer Education Series brought to you by www.tradebooster.com preparing you for the “Internet Simplified” Webinar on 31st July, 2009. This article starts at the very basic of explaining what a domain name is.

What is a domain name?

If you search for definitions of “domain name” on Google, the results would be fairly complex and most likely you would give up pretty soon. However, the purpose of this Customer Education Series is to make you understand the Internet as a layman and not as a technician. So lets start by understanding what a domain name actually is.

Lets assume I am a professor in a University and taking a class on this subject. I have my students seated in front of me in a 10 x 6 matrix i.e. 10 rows with 6 students in each row. Now during the course of the session I need to ask a particular student a question. I can refer to him as the student seated in row 5, 3rd seat from the left or I can refer to him as “James” which is his name. In both scenarios I am referring to the same person. His name however, is a more convenient way of referring to him rather than the first method. Specially so, because I need to remember the names of 60 students in my class.

This is exactly how the Internet or for that matter any network works. The real location of a server / machine on the network is identified by something called the “IP Address” (IP = Internet Protocol). A typical IP address looks like 122.160.156.225. Now imagine 60 students in my class, each having a specific IP address (his seat location). How difficult or almost impossible would it be for me to remember that. Isnt remembering names much much easier?

So the name of the student is like the domain name and the seat location of the student is his IP address. Now imagine day 2 of the same class. James, the student in question, is now seated in row 7, 2nd seat from the right. Today, if I need to refer James by his location I would call him as the student on row 7, 2nd from the right. However, if I need to refer him by his name, I would still call him as James. And this is exactly why names are better than IP addresses.

A domain name is practically an easier way to refer to your Internet Business, though the actual location is always the IP address.

A domain name looks like:

www.example.com

Now, let’s break this up:

example – this is the domain name

.com – this is the domain extension

For those of you who have used the Internet for years now, you would recollect that the domain names began with 3 possible extensions viz. .com, .net and .org.

However, for those who were late in catching up with the Internet, their preferred domains were gone by that time. Hence, today you would see multiple domain extenions like .biz, .info and country specific extensions like .in, .us, .uk. This has given an opportunity to the late entrants to get a domain name of their choice to establish their presence in the World of Internet.

To summarise, a domain name is just a name for referring to your Internet identity. The actual process however works on IP addresses. Just like James could shift from 1 seat to another class after class, you can also choose to shift from one provider to another, but the name still remains the same and hence easier for all to remember.

The next article would cover more details on domain extensions and registries. Stay tuned!!

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