When you first research buying a domain name there are so many terms and acronyms, that it can become very confusing. The domain name industry is at the forefront of technology and a new term appears almost daily. To help you understand the content you might read here on Domainmonster.com or on our Blog we’re going to define 5 extremely important domain name terms.

1. 1. Domain Name The basis of our entire industry. A domain name is an easy to remember representation of an address on the Internet. Internet Protocol (IP) uses numeric addresses, like 185.125.643.84 to address devices. A domain name simply makes that IP address easy to remember. Without domain names the Internet would never have developed in the manner it has. Imagine trying to remember 6 to 12 digits for every site you visited rather than a word or phrase. A domain name is not a website. It is an address that can be used to bring up information stored on the internet. It holds no data itself.
2. 2. WHOISAnother term that you will often hear talked about. You may have already seen the free WHOIS privacy service that we offer on Domainmonster.com . The WHOIS is a database that contains details about domain names. Usually this is the company who the domain is registered with (registrar) and the business or individual who registered the domain name (registrant). This allows people to see what domains have already been registered and by whom. The WHOIS database is a public document. You can keep your details private using our free privacy service included with your domain name purchase.
3. 3. Domain Name System The Domain Name System or DNS is the system which translates your domain name into an IP address. When you type Domainmonster.com into your web browser, the DNS sends you to the address that holds the images, text and content of our site and your browser displays it to you! The DNS is the link between the words that you type into your address bar and the numeric addresses (IP addresses) that work behind the scenes.
4. 4. Top Level Domain (TLD) A Top Level Domain is a domain name extension. This is the part of the domain name after the text that you choose. I.e. Domainmonster.com. Top level domains are operated by Registries like Verisign (.com) or Nominet(.uk). They fall into two categories, Generic Top Level Domains, like .com or .org, which have no geographical affiliation and Country Code Top Level Domains, which are TLDs that are registered to a certain locality or nation, e.g. .uk (United Kingdom), .de (Germany), .nl.
5. 5. Web Hosting This is where the content for your website is held online. All the data that you see online from text to photos to tweets have to be held on a server or machine accessible to the Internet, just like files on your computer. This is where web hosting comes in. Most domain names are used to direct to some form of web hosting, therefore making certain information visible when someone types the domain name into their browser bar. Always bear in mind that web hosting and domain names are separate. They can both exist independently but come together to make what most people think of as a “website”.

Learning these few basic terms will make navigating the domain name industry a lot easier. When you register a domain name, bear these things in mind, as every term on this list plays a big part in your presence on the web!