In today’s podcast, I will be looking at “what you need to know about domain names.” This is one of three podcast topics related to naming your new retirement business and choosing the perfect retirement business domain name for your website.
Upfront, I’m going to tell you that this is a straightforward guide to domain names, and I’m sure there are plenty of experts out there who will point out all sorts of issues. But, I’m not trying to turn you into an expert, just trying to give you basic information that I hope will help you when you’re planning or talking to people about your website.
Domain name
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last 10 or 15 years, you should by now have seen a whole range of domain names come and go. Prominent current examples are Facebook.com, Google.com, and Amazon.com. And at some stage in the future, there will be yourbusiness.com.
What is a domain name? It’s simply your address on the Internet or World Wide Web, and it allows potential visitors to access your website.
I’m going to use Amazon.com as the example so let’s break it down into its components.
The full domain name is WWW.Amazon.com.
Top-level domains
Top-level domains or TLDs come in two primary flavors. The first is the generic version, often abbreviated to gTLD. Most of these you’re going to be very familiar with, and they include.com .org, .net, .info, and the less common .biz.
For most people in the US and anybody wanting a wider geographic exposure, the .com version is the top-level domain of choice.
Another version of top-level domains is the country code versions or ccTLDs. These include .ca for Canada, .FR for France, .co.UK for the United Kingdom, and even though you won’t see it too often, there is a.US for the United States. One country-specific top-level domain you might want to be careful of is the .ru for Russia, which sadly is often associated with Internet problems.
Mid-level domain
Most people think of the mid-level part of the domain as the website name. So for www.Amazon.com, it’s Amazon. So although lots of people will have .com, .ca or .co.UK in their full domain name, this mid-level part of the domain will be specific and unique to your retirement business website.
Machine name
The final part of the domain name is the www. this is the machine name which, quite frankly, you don’t really need. Most modern web browsers like Chrome, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are perfectly capable of just working with Amazon.com. Try it if you don’t believe me.
Universal resource locator [ URL]
The next thing we need to look at is the universal resource locator, usually simply abbreviated to URL.
You need to know about the URL because it includes the domain name and has extra information. So again, looking at the Amazon.com example, we have
You’ll recognize the middle part www.Amazon.com, but now we have two extra parts.
The first part, HTTPS://, is a fancy protocol used to move information around the world wide web. The HTTP refers to hypertext transfer protocol, and the extra letter S tells us that this website uses a secure version of the transfer protocol. The fact is that there are still plenty of websites out there that use the simple HTTP version, but, especially if you’re collecting personal information with a web form or even more so if you’re trying to sell anything online, you really should be looking at the more secure version. Google in particular likes to see this extra level of security, so if you want to be listed as high as possible on the Google search engine, you should be looking at getting an SSL Certificate to activate the HTTPS protocol and the little padlock that you’ll see in your browser address bar.
Sorry about this being a bit heavy going, but we are getting close to the end.
Internet protocol address (IP)
The Internet protocol address, often referred to as IP address for short, is what your computer and the website’s computer use as an address. In the case of Amazon, they have multiple IP addresses, one of which is 72.21.215.90. You can try it out by typing these numbers into your web browser, and after hitting enter, you should be taken directly to one of the Amazon websites.
So that’s how computers talk to each other, but really remembering all those numbers will never be as easy as remembering the name Amazon. So these numbers get translated into the domain names that you see in your web browser.
Domain name system.
Although you’re unlikely to get troubled by IP addresses, you almost certainly, at some point, will come across DNS or DNS servers. This is important, and it is what’s called the domain name system. This domain name system and the DNS server’s job is to translate the unfriendly IP address of numbers into the user-friendly domain name that we all use.
Why is it important? If you have a website for any length of time, there’s an excellent chance that you’ll switch the company that hosts your website. When you do this, the domain name servers change. The good news is that usually, this is all handled by the host company.
As an example, if you swap from WordPress.com to GoDaddy, then the name servers change from
You’ll also need to know about these DNS servers if you ever have more than one website name or domain name.