You’ve seen them on billboards and TV. You’ve heard them in radio spots and in casual conversations. You’ve sent and received hundreds of e-mails with them inserted in the message.
Nope, it’s not a business name, address or phone number. But it’s becoming even more important than those identifying pieces of information to many of us.
It’s an Internet domain name. You know, all the “yaddayadda-dot-coms” that have become part of our daily lives. (There’s a local auto dealer that I’d like to strangle every time I see his commercial and hear him loudly close with his website address, emphasizing the DOT COM – really, is the fact that he has a website the most important thing he has to tell us?)
You probably have one with your own identifier attached to it: your e-mail address, as in suzieq@mynetwork.com. Or maybe your business, church, organization, or even your family has a domain name so you can better serve your customers or members, as well as attract new ones, via the Internet. Many online entrepreneurs have basically built their business around their domain name and the latest web technology.
Remember the Name
Why do we need domain names? Basically, they function as virtual pointers to the real IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of devices that are connected to the Internet.
The reason that domain names were invented is pretty simple: we humans find it much easier to remember names than numbers, especially complex ones like IP addresses. This is why you’ll usually hear a business’ phone number three times in a radio or TV commercial but may only hear their Web site address once – if at all.
Computers, on the other hand, see everything as a string of ones and zeroes, so they work best with numbers. Names have no personal meaning or emotional attachment to them like they do for us humans.
For example, I can execute the DOS command ping www.wordpress.org on my PC and find out that this domain name actually points to the IP address of 72.233.56.138 – one of those “dotted decimal” addresses assigned to computers on the Internet. In this case, it’s the IP address of the server where the main WordPress website resides. By knowing this set of numbers, my PC can send out packets of information to that IP address and know that it will get to the correct destination.
The Domain Name System
Back in the early days of the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), there were few computers connected to what would eventually evolve into “The Internet.” But even then, the researchers using this experimental network found it much easier to remember and use names than IP or physical addresses.
Soon, an official list of system names and matching IP addresses began to be compiled – sort of an “ARPANET white pages directory” – and multiple strategically placed servers kept copies of this database available for lookups. This distributed names-to-numbers directory system became so popular that it was formally adopted as the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS).
DNS is still one of the technological foundations for our e-mail, Web surfing, game-playing, online shopping, and other Internet-based traffic going all around the world. If you’ve ever experienced problems with accessing DNS servers, you’ll know it quickly when these applications fail to connect to other systems because the domain name can’t be found and matched to its IP address!
So the next time you hear or see an Internet domain name in an ad, remember – it’s being provided because you’re a human, not a computer!
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