What is a domain name?

A domain name is a unique name of your website on the Internet. For example, our site has the domain all-about-hosting.com. Whenever people enter this name into their Internet browser, our site comes up. So a domain name is a means of assigning a name to your website so that people know how to find it.

As you can see, our domain name ends with .com letters. There are several possible endings (called TLDs - Top Level Domains). When you buy your domain name, you must choose one of them. Most popular TLDs are as follows:

.com and .biz - originally intended for "commercial" websites, but now used for all types of websites. Whenever possible, you should get a .com domain because people are most familiar with them.
.info - intended for informational websites (news, directories, etc).
.org - intended for non-profit organizations
.net - intended for companies offering hosting, Internet access, and other Internet-related services.
.name - intended for personal homepages.
Country TLDs. Each country has a domain ending associated with it. For example, Germany has a TLD .de, France has .fr and so on. You should consider buying a country-specific domain if you expect that most visitors to your website will be from a specific country, because they will be most familiar with their country's TLD.

Of course, there are no strict rules which force you to have a certain type of domain for a certain type of website. You can decide on your own which one is right for you.

In order to have a domain name, you must buy it. There are several companies which allow you to buy domain names, but the one we highly recommend is GoDaddy. They have very low prices and offer many TLDs to choose from.

The good thing about domain names is that they belong to you, not the company where you buy hosting. This way when you change the hosting provider, the domain name of the site stays the same and users will usually even not notice that any change happened.

Need more help? Ask your questions at our Domain forum!

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