Guides & Resources For Successful Internet Presence!

This website has been established to provide information about internet domain name registration services and is updated regularly.

URLs and You
For internet users, these are known as "Uniform Resource Locators" or URLs. Type one into your browser's "Address" field, press Enter, and voila! You are magically transported to a web page for that business or organization. But how does this magic happen?

Free Personals And Profiles

URLs rely on the Domain Name System. These names are read in sections from right-to-left. Note that the URLs above end in .com, .edu, .org, and .net. These are known as "Top Level Domains" or TLDs. Each TLD was initially created for a particular type of organization that connected to the original US DoD ARPANET (predecessor to the internet):

.com = commercial organizations and businesses
.edu = educational institutions such colleges and universities
.gov = US Federal government agencies
.mil = the US Military
.net = network and telecoms providers
.org = non-profit organizations

(see more on the left)

Masters of Their Own Domain
It used to be that a single domain registrar in the U.S., Network Solutions, managed all domain name assignments for the whole internet. In 1999, this lucrative business was put out to bid, so now a number of international domain registrars administer the various TLDs.

In addition, each country has a designated two-character TLD that they are responsible for, such as .us (United States), .ca (Canada), .uk (United Kingdom), .mx (Mexico), .de (Germany or Deutschland), .it (Italia), etc. Many of these country-specific domains also maintain sub-domains that mirror the American TLDs, such as ".co.uk" for commercial entities in the UK.

The reason for all this registration administration is pretty obvious: there can only be one "speronews.com" or "duq.edu" (for my alma mater, Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA) in the entire world. If domain names were not unique, our web browsers and email would get very confused.

Once an organization has registered a domain name, they can create their own sub-domains. For example, the U.S. Marine Corps has created the 'beaufort.usmc.mil' sub-domain so they can better manage the internet services of their Beaufort, SC, area bases and personnel. Thus the URL www.beaufort.usmc.mil points to the World Wide Web (www) server for the USMC bases in Beaufort.

Similarly, The Register, an irreverent IT-focused online publication headquartered in the UK, has the URL www.theregister.co.uk for its web site. This indicates that their corporate domain is registered under the commercial sub-domain for the United Kingdom (co.uk).

Select a topic on the left to get more information about domain names.