Beginners Guide to Domain Names

 What is a domain name?

A Domain Name works just like the contacts list in your mobile telephone.  You may have an entry called ‘Mum’ and when you select it, your mobile telephone number dials your mum’s the telephone number.  It’s much easier to remember ‘Mum’ rather than a long telephone number.    Within the Internet, the term ‘Domain Name’ is used,  which works the same as your mobile telephone contact name except that all the Internet users around the world can see 'Mum' and the number or "web hosting server" associated with it.

A Domain Name needs an owner who is responsible for ensuring entry is correctly updated, because the entry can seen all over the world the complete domain name must be unique, to help simplify this the domain names have "types" (i.e. .com,  .net, .org and .co.uk) each of these types represent a kind of web-site or location, here are some examples.

.co.uk     UK commercial web-site 
.me.uk    UK personal web-site
.eu           European commercial web-site
.com       US commercial web-site
.org         Not for profit web-site

So your domain name will need one of these types, take a look at the list below to decide which it most appropriate to your needs.

You can now choose your domain name,  so If you wanted to use the domain name "q7internet-demo" you can add any of the domain name types to the end to make up the full domain name for example "q7internet-demo.co.uk" or "q7internet-demo.com".  You should note that each of these domain names are separate and unique, if you want to own the title to "q7internet-demo" all over the world you would need to buy all of the possible domain types which can be very expensive.  You need to know that someone else, a competitor, might buy a domain name with a different type and set up a competitive web-site or direct visitors to their own web-site.
You will need to strike a balance between how many domain names you buy and the risk that someone else might be able to use them. 

All Internet users around the world can look up the list of Domain Names to see what is registered and what is available.  To ensure information is kept up to date, Domain Owners register their domain names for a number of years.  Typically 2-10 years is common.  If the registration period lapses, someone else can register your domain name and store their server address and so take over your website.

Here at Q7 we provide you the tools to check if your chosen Domain / Friendly name is available and automatically process your registration and renewal to ensure you don’t let your domain name fall into the control of someone else.

Domain Types