What is a Domain Top Level and Sub Domain

Domain Names

On the internet, all the machines like a personal computer, laptop, mobile phones and smartphones etc., communicate with one another through Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and in case of secured socket layer (SSL) the same protocol is called (https). ISP allots IP addresses to such machines. As IP Addresses are difficult to remember, domain names are used to manage, surf and understand the internet or World Wide Web. Without domain names, URLs would be a series of numbers of IP addresses. Domain Names facilitates the internet users to recall the IP addresses. Domain Name facilitates the setting up of a website, sending and receiving email or building an online store. Domain Names are like www.example.com, out of which one has to recall the memorable part of the domain name which is an example, used by the public, organizations or business centres to register their domain on the web.

For domain name registration the internet needs three parties that Domain Registrant, Domain Registrar and the domain registry. When the public types a domain name in the browser then, first of all, it creates a DNS query. The query searches for the IP Address of the domain name and knocks at the Domain Name servers.

While the .com in www.example.com is called top-level domain, example (the memorable part of the domain) is called the second level domain and www is called the third level domain. The third level domain does not require any registration whereas TLD can be generic (gTLD) or country code (ccTLD). In www.example.com the TLD .com in generic and it is registered in the UK with country code UK it will end up with the UK instead of com. The users can know the website with the country codes like in for India. At present, there are more than 20 gTLDs and about 250 ccTLD’s all over the world. Want to know more about Sub Domains, Add-On Domains and Parked Domains.