Simply stated, a domain is space allocated to you on the web. A website typically occupies one domain, such as www.mycompany.com. A domain can be divided into subdomains that consist of parts of a larger website (think of them as shops in a department store). These domains can be administered separately. For example, university websites often have http://department.university.com for each of their colleges. This is preferable to having thousands of directories to manage under one domain (http://university.com/chemistry) for each department. If you have a website that is very large and departmentalized, subdomains are a good means of adding organization and security to your website. Many hosting providers offer additional subdomains free of charge. Other hosts even offer additional separate domains free of charge. This allows you to administer completely different websites with different domain names (www.onlineshop.com, www.personalsite.com, and www.webdesignsite.com all with one hosting account). To browse hosting plans with additional domains click here.

Each website has its own address called an IP address (ex. 164.168.3.4). This is your unique address on the web. Of course it would be difficult to remember all the digits for each website you wish to visit, so we use domain names instead. A domain name is just a pointer to the IP address. There are many different kids of domains such as .com, .net, .org, and other country domains (.ca for Canada , .de for Germany , and so on). There are also lesser used domains such as .biz and .tv. The .com domain is the most visible and it is most easily indexed by search engines. To create a domain name for your site you must first check to see if it is already registered. This can be done at www.register.com or a similar domain registration company. If the domain is available, you can pay a yearly fee to have it registered. Some hosting plans include free domain name registration. If your hosting plan does not include free domain name registration you must pay for a company to register it for you, and then register the domain with the chosen hosting company. After you have registered your domain name, it will be added to global DNS (domain name servers), and no one else can register that domain.