When you first start a website, and you’re searching through tutorial after tutorial to make sure you get it right, you probably come across one term over and over again: Domain name.
Domain names cause a lot of confusion for budding website owners, and it’s almost always due to not exactly knowing what one is. After all, you also learn about hosts, servers, and every other thing when you’re getting started, and it’s a lot to take in all at once.
We’re going to clear up this confusion and give you a complete rundown of what a domain name is, how it works, and how you can go about picking the right one.
What is a Domain Name?
The easiest way to get a quick understanding of what a domain name is is to think of your website as a home.
You have the actual home, with all your furnishings and cool gizmos, just like your website has all of your images and content, and then you have your street address. Your site’s domain name is its street address. It functions almost exactly the same, too.
When an internet user wants to visit your website, they type your domain name into their browser and get taken right to it. Think of the browser as your car’s GPS. You pop in an address, and it gets you where you need to go.
How Do Domain Names Work?
Keeping with the house example, you can think of the internet as a neighborhood. Except, in the case of the internet, the neighborhood is so massive you couldn’t possibly travel across all of it.
Like a neighborhood, the internet is formed by hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of servers that hold all the information you can find through a simple browser search. Your website is kept on one of these many servers, and which one it’s on is completely dependent on which hosting service you decided to buy for your site. Sometimes, you can get your domain name from the same company, but you can also purchase a domain from an entirely different company.
Now, when an internet user types your domain name into their Google Chrome, Firefox, or another web browser, the browser searches for the server your website is on, the server sends all the information necessary to pull up your site, and the browser accesses your website. This all usually happens within a second or two.
How To Start A Website and Buy a Domain
When you start a website, you have to lay out the groundwork first, make basic design decisions, and get an overall feel for what you want your site to be. Then, you need to find a host you’re comfortable paying to put your website on the internet before fleshing it all out.
However, that doesn’t matter if you don’t have a domain name set up so people can find your site.
To start, you need an idea of what you want your domain name to be. The internet already has nearly half a billion domains registered, so you’re going to want to take your time, find something that’s simple and memorable, and ensure it’s available.
Then you need to pay a registrar to register the domain as yours. This typically requires you to pay an inexpensive annual fee. Once you’ve completed the process the registrar puts you through, you have a domain! Just make sure you pay your annual fees, or you’ll forfeit the domain for someone else to take.