Internet Domains and (Small) Business
The Internet domain name system is probably the most misunderstood aspect of the Internet in the eyes of the small business owner. The questions I get and the problems I've seen have prompted me to write this article to provide some basic information and some pragmatic rules for small business owners to follow.
| Most people today see domain names as part of two different facilities, e-mail and web addresses. In an e-mail address, the domain is the part to the right of the @ symbol. In a web address (Universal Resource Locator or URL) it is the part after the "http://" or "ftp://" and before the next "/" so in http://www.pacdat.net/Digital_Rag/ the domain is "www.pacdat.net". |
First a bit of history and some basic semantics.
Putting names to computers was invented to give human memory a bit of a break. Internet systems actually address each other using a set of numbers called an Internet Protocol (IP) address - based on 4 sets of digits from 0 to 255 each separated by a period as follows:
1.2.3.4 or 192.168.100.1 or 24.80.116.254 or 255.255.255.255
Back when there were only a few hundred or even a few thousand systems connected to the Internet, there was a simple text file conversion utility that identified a computer with a number. These files of addresses were all kept up to date by hand. As the number of machines grew, keeping the files up to date became a real problem.
| Example of a "hosts" file
192.168.100.1 pacdat1 |
Fortunately Dr. Mockapetris and the late Dr. Jonathan Postel, in 1983, saw the need for a more automated and distributed facility and invented the Domain Name Service (DNS).
