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About Domain Names

The Beginning of the journey...

What is a Domain Name ?

Your first step in online world...

A Domain Name is the first thing that is required to make your presence online. It's not just a name. It's the identity you make over the web, i.e. in the world of internet. Be it yourself / your company / organisation / products / services / idea, whatever... its the domain name only that gives it a unique brand identity over the internet landscape.

A domain name (ex.mavenheads.com) itself comprises of two elements: before and after "the dot".

Name (ex mavenheads).
Extension (ex .com)

The name part is any combination of alpha numeric characters that you can think of. This part before the dot is the domain name that you register withn the Domain Names providers over the ineternet (like us).

The extension(/s) represents a sort of logical groupings that you can choose to give a sort of meaning to your domain name(/s). This part to the right of the dot, such as "com", "net", "org" and so on, is known as a "top-level domain" or TLD.

Related Topics

The second part (technicalled called label) of the domain names, i.e, the one after the dot (first label from the right most), is technically called a TLD. Initially only a handful of TLDs existed. Best example of early TLDs are:

.com - originally meant for (US) commercial organisations.
.org - originally meant for Non-profit organizations.
.net - originally meant for Internet providers.
.info - Information services.

The restriction with these TLDs are no more in place and any person can register domain names with these TLDs. Not only this, over the period of time since usage of internet among general public, a lot more TLDs have come into existence. These TLDs can be classified as follows:

gTLD - called generic "Top-Level-Domains"

sTLD - Sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLD).
uTLD - Unsponsored Top Level Domains.

ccTLD - Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD).

gTLD - generic Top-Level-Domain: .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .name, and .pro are gTLDs that are open to all. There are some gTLDs that have some restrictions and hence not open to all like - .gov., .int, .mil.

sTLD - A sponsored TLD is a specialized top-level domain that has a sponsor representing a specific community served by the domain. The communities are formed/based on ethnic, geographical, professional, technical or other theme concepts. Some of these so called sTLDs have restrictive use (like .edu, .gov, .mil) while most of them are open to all for registration. Examples are .legal, .hotel, .club, .travel etc...

uTLD - An unsponsored TLD operates under policies established by the global Internet community directly through the ICANN process. All the gTLDs that are not sponsored ones are uTLDs like .com, .net, .org etc...

ccTLD - TLDs with two letters (.xx) have been established for over 250 countries and external territories and are referred to as "country-code" TLDs or "ccTLDs". Examples are .in for India, .ca for Canada, .jp for Japan etc... Registrants of .ccTLDs domains must meet the Local Presence Requirements of specific country / territory.

IDNs - Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) permit the global community to use a domain name in their native language or script. This is enabled by allowing domain names to have characters from different scripts, beyond the letters (a to z), digits (0 to 9) and hyphen (-). Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-Latin scripts (for example, Arabic or Chinese or Devanagri).

IDNs variant TLDs (both gTLD & ccTLD) have also started coming into existence.

Examples: IDN ccTLDs are: .भारत (Devanagri/India), .中國 (Traditional Chinese/China)

Examples: IDN gTLDs are: .संगठन (.org in Devanagri), .コム (.com in Japaneese)