Domain Names are the basis for a
human friendly Internet addressing system. There has to be a way
for a viewer (a user like you or me) to find a web site and remember
it. That's the purpose of a domain name, it allows people to
remember the name of a web site.
Just like the phone number used to route telephone calls, the
Internet has a numbering system which is the foundation for the names
which we use to find a web site.
The Internet address numbering system is called the Internet
Protocol address (a series of numbers like this:
123.123.321.256). The Internet Protocol (IP) numbering system is
very similar to the telephone numbering system used in the world.
That is, this name points to this number which
points to a specific physical phone.
On the Internet, a domain name (i.e., yourname.com) points to
an IP address (e.g., 123.123.321.256) which points to the host
server (e.g., server1.webhost.net) that is hosting the
web site for the applicable domain name.
In the case of telephone numbers, if you don't know a phone number for someone you wish to call, then
you call information and ask the nice operator to help you. The
same process works with the Internet. When you want to see a web site, instead of calling the phone company's information service,
you use one or more Internet Search Engines to locate the web site you
want to visit.
To summarize, with the phone system your name, city, state/region or
province and country in combination is your physical location and is
the equivalent of a domain name. Your physical location points to
the phone number (the equivalent of the Internet's IP address) at that
location. And the telephone over which you talk is serving up
your voice (which makes the telephone company the equivalent of a hosting service).
On the Internet, the Domain Name (the physical location) points to
the IP address and the IP address points to the Domain
Name. If you know one, then you can determine the
other. Both must be unique, just like the phone system.
And, the IP address points to the hosting server. The diagram below shows a
Telephone/Internet comparison.
