The concept of Domain names and their purpose
The internet revolution changed the way people interacted, engaged and most importantly their lifestyle. A complete changeover of lifestyle was never expected at such a pace, but it happened on the name “Internet”.
When Symbolics Inc registered the first .com domain name on the planet, no one expected a revolution of changes behind it. The change was adaptable, it changed the world and it opened billions of possibilities.
336 million domain names was registered in 2017 alone, probably billions of domain names are standing with different registrars like GoDaddy, Namecheap etc.
Domain
Domain names doesn’t control anything, but we can control the domain name which we register with different domain registration services.
Registering a domain was a giant process in the beginning, but today we have thousands of domain name registration services with maximum possible “easy to use” interfaces.
Every computer has an IP address, so whenever someone hosts a website and its files on a web server (which is also a computer), the only way to access that information by the public is to type in that IP address in their browser.
Well, typing and remembering IP addresses is a hell of a job and it’s not a practical solution either. There comes the use case of domain names, because we can use these domain names to mask the IP addresses and help users remember the name and type the domain name easily to access the data.
Reserving a domain is easy with services like GoDaddy, if you’re starting up a business online, we would recommend you to reserve your dotcom domain before anyone does. When it comes to choosing your domain name, it’s as easy as looking for your domain name on GoDaddy and making sure it’s available, if it’s not available go for dotorg or dotnet ones.
So whenever you see a domain name, keep in mind that the IP behind is the actual hero and the domain name is just an outfit.
Revolution
Internet and dotcom became a big deal in this world just because of the ability of the users to access information without the help of a human being or asking someone about it.
The data and information they used to get was more authenticated and trustable. Internet, working as a data and an information aggregator changed the way people accessed information, but even Google has a domain name called Google.com which revolutionised the access to information with the the search engine concept and with the help of a simple domain name.
A big majority of people still use dotcom domains to launch their product or a website. Subdomain systems were introduced (it’s as simple as name.yourdomain.com), email systems on the domain name was introduced (hey@yourdomain.com), most importantly DNS (domain management system) was introduced to manage the domain names at its most complicated ways.
DNS
Domain name management systems are the most important tools associated with a domain name. These controls are basically provided by services and domain registrars like GoDaddy and Namecheap.
A domain name masks the IP address, but it has even more features to control the entirety of a domain name you hold. There are value points like CNAME, Txt values, MX records, Nameservers etc.
Well, getting into the technical side of all these might not be the right thing to do now, but to keep it simple, every single value or parameter has their own important feature to control a domain name.
If you want to connect your domain name with another server, you can add nameservers, if you need an email address with your domain name: MX records will help (it’s as simple as that).
Concept
The concept of domain names is simple, but the revolution these domain names brought up to the people’s life is insanely huge. We had a complete paradigm shift in the last 30 years time.
No one ever expected to have access (free access) to such amount of data and information inside their pocket. Infact, the technology has improved a lot that now you don’t need a device in your pocket, just talking to your watch might get you the information you want (anytime, anywhere).
That’s how it works, domain names changed the world in a better way. As a matter of fact there are other TLD’s like dotnet, dotorg etc, but dotcom had its own stand and it’s still the world’s top level domain (TLD) without a doubt.
The revolution just began in 1985, and the show is still running with improvements. There’s lot to come, more to show and to revolutionize.
