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74-551: A fully qualified domain name ( FQDN ), sometimes also called an absolute domain name , is a domain name that specifies its exact location in the tree hierarchy of the Domain Name System (DNS). It specifies all domain levels, including the top-level domain and the root zone . A fully qualified domain name is distinguished by its lack of ambiguity in terms of DNS zone location in the hierarchy of DNS labels: it can be interpreted only in one way. A fully qualified domain name

148-505: A World Wide Web server, and mail.example.com could be an email server, each intended to perform only the implied function. Modern technology allows multiple physical servers with either different (cf. load balancing ) or even identical addresses (cf. anycast ) to serve a single hostname or domain name, or multiple domain names to be served by a single computer. The latter is very popular in Web hosting service centers, where service providers host

222-466: A generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. A registrar operates in accordance with the guidelines of the designated domain name registries . The need for a central authority to assign or administer domain names emerged from collaboration among computer network pioneers as they created the Domain Name System in the 1980s. In a 1982 draft Request for Comments (RFC), editor Jonathan Postel proposed

296-512: A tree of domain names. Each node in the tree holds information associated with the domain name. The tree sub-divides into zones beginning at the DNS root zone . A domain name consists of one or more parts, technically called labels , that are conventionally concatenated, and delimited by dots, such as example.com . When the Domain Name System was devised in the 1980s, the domain name space

370-508: A "czar of domains." In her revisions of the draft, Elizabeth Feinler crossed out "czar" and introduced the term "registrar." She designated the DOD Network Information Center , of which she was the head, as the registrar of top-level domains. This draft was published as RFC 819 . The RFC standardized the naming system for computers on the internet, creating domain names. It specifies that "associated with each domain there

444-407: A "dropped" name—when the domain name's registration expires and is then deleted, either because the registrant abandons the domain or because the registrant did not renew the registration prior to deletion. Several organizations post market-share-ranked lists of domain name registrars and numbers of domains registered at each. The published lists differ in which top-level domains (TLDs) they use; in

518-492: A FQDN ends in a dot ( . ) to denote the top of the DNS tree. Labels in the Domain Name System are case-insensitive , and may therefore be written in any desired capitalization method, but most commonly domain names are written in lowercase in technical contexts. A hostname is a domain name that has at least one associated IP address . Domain names serve to identify Internet resources, such as computers, networks, and services, with

592-407: A US$ 0.18 annual administration fee to ICANN. Many registrars also offer registration through reseller affiliates. An end-user either registers directly with a registrar, or indirectly through one or more layers of resellers. As of 2023, the retail cost generally ranges from a low of about $ 9.70 per year to about $ 35 per year for a simple com domain registration, although registrars often discount

666-667: A component in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for Internet resources such as websites (e.g., en.wikipedia.org). Domain names are also used as simple identification labels to indicate ownership or control of a resource. Such examples are the realm identifiers used in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the Domain Keys used to verify DNS domains in e-mail systems, and in many other Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). An important function of domain names

740-542: A database of artists and agents, chose whorepresents.com , which can be misread. In such situations, the proper meaning may be clarified by placement of hyphens when registering a domain name. For instance, Experts Exchange , a programmers' discussion site, used expertsexchange.com , but changed its domain name to experts-exchange.com . The domain name is a component of a uniform resource locator (URL) used to access websites , for example: A domain name may point to multiple IP addresses to provide server redundancy for

814-450: A domain name identifies a network domain or an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, or a server computer. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System (DNS). Any name registered in the DNS is a domain name. Domain names are organized in subordinate levels ( subdomains ) of the DNS root domain, which

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888-517: A domain name, the labels are separated by a full stop (period). Domain names are often seen in analogy to real estate in that domain names are foundations on which a website can be built, and the highest quality domain names, like sought-after real estate, tend to carry significant value, usually due to their online brand-building potential, use in advertising, search engine optimization , and many other criteria. A few companies have offered low-cost, below-cost or even free domain registration with

962-429: A few other alternative DNS root providers that try to compete or complement ICANN's role of domain name administration, however, most of them failed to receive wide recognition, and thus domain names offered by those alternative roots cannot be used universally on most other internet-connecting machines without additional dedicated configurations. In the process of registering a domain name and maintaining authority over

1036-473: A lack of response to a domain name query as an indication that the domain does not exist, and that the message can be treated as undeliverable. The original VeriSign implementation broke this assumption for mail, because it would always resolve an erroneous domain name to that of Site Finder. While VeriSign later changed Site Finder's behaviour with regard to email, there was still widespread protest about VeriSign's action being more in its financial interest than in

1110-468: A practice known as domain slamming . Many of these transfer scams involve a notice sent in the mail, fax, or e-mail. Some scammers contact end-users by telephone (because the contact information is available through WHOIS ) to obtain more information. These notices would include information publicly available from the WHOIS database to add to the look of authenticity. The text would include legalese to confuse

1184-448: A registrar does not confer any legal ownership of the domain name, only an exclusive right of use for a particular duration of time. The use of domain names in commerce may subject them to trademark law . The practice of using a simple memorable abstraction of a host's numerical address on a computer network dates back to the ARPANET era, before the advent of today's commercial Internet. In

1258-400: A set of special-use domain names. This list contains domain names such as example , local , localhost , and test . Other top-level domain names containing trade marks are registered for corporate use. Cases include brands such as BMW , Google , and Canon . Below the top-level domains in the domain name hierarchy are the second-level domain (SLD) names. These are the names directly to

1332-488: A shared registry system opened up the previous domain registration monopoly to new entities known as registrars, which were qualified by ICANN to do business. Many registrars had to compete with each other, and although some companies offered value added services or used viral marketing , others, such as VeriSign and the Domain Registry of America attempted to trick customers to switch from their current registrar using

1406-449: A text-based label that is easier to memorize than the numerical addresses used in the Internet protocols. A domain name may represent entire collections of such resources or individual instances. Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, also called hostnames . The term hostname is also used for the leaf labels in the domain name system, usually without further subordinate domain name space. Hostnames appear as

1480-660: A unique identity. Organizations can choose a domain name that corresponds to their name, helping Internet users to reach them easily. A generic domain is a name that defines a general category, rather than a specific or personal instance, for example, the name of an industry, rather than a company name. Some examples of generic names are books.com , music.com , and travel.info . Companies have created brands based on generic names, and such generic domain names may be valuable. Domain names are often simply referred to as domains and domain name registrants are frequently referred to as domain owners , although domain name registration with

1554-441: A variety of models adopted to recoup the costs to the provider. These usually require that domains be hosted on their website within a framework or portal that includes advertising wrapped around the domain holder's content, revenue from which allows the provider to recoup the costs. Domain registrations were free of charge when the DNS was new. A domain holder may provide an infinite number of subdomains in their domain. For example,

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1628-465: Is sos.state.oh.us . 'sos' is said to be a sub-domain of 'state.oh.us', and 'state' a sub-domain of 'oh.us', etc. In general, subdomains are domains subordinate to their parent domain. An example of very deep levels of subdomain ordering are the IPv6 reverse resolution DNS zones , e.g., 1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.ip6.arpa, which is the reverse DNS resolution domain name for

1702-561: Is a process established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to ensure that gTLD domain registrars meet specific standards and requirements in providing gTLD domain registration services. The country code ccTLDs typically have their own registrar accreditation processes. To become an ICANN-accredited domain registrar, companies must undergo a comprehensive and rigorous application process. The application fee for ICANN Accreditation as of April 12, 2021,

1776-496: Is a single person (or office) called the registrar." The earliest domain names were names of organizations, such as .arpa for the Advanced Research Projects Agency . Feinler switched to a system of naming by generic categories, creating .mil , .gov , .org , .edu , and .com as generic top-level domain . This existed alongside a system of country code top-level domains administered by Postel. Eventually

1850-511: Is also significant disquiet regarding the United States Government's political influence over ICANN. This was a significant issue in the attempt to create a .xxx top-level domain and sparked greater interest in alternative DNS roots that would be beyond the control of any single country. Additionally, there are numerous accusations of domain name front running , whereby registrars, when given whois queries, automatically register

1924-478: Is conventionally written as a list of domain labels separated using the full stop “ . ” character ( dot or period ). The top of the hierarchy in an FQDN begins with the rightmost label. For instance, in the FQDN somehost.example.com , com is a label directly under the root zone , example is nested under com , and finally somehost is nested under example.com . The topmost layer of every domain name

1998-562: Is maintained and serviced technically by an administrative organization operating a registry. A registry is responsible for maintaining the database of names registered within the TLD it administers. The registry receives registration information from each domain name registrar authorized to assign names in the corresponding TLD and publishes the information using a special service, the WHOIS protocol. Registries and registrars usually charge an annual fee for

2072-407: Is maintained by the domain name registries, which contract with domain registrars to provide registration services to the public. An end user selects a registrar to provide the registration service, and that registrar becomes the designated registrar for the domain chosen by the user. Only the designated registrar may modify or delete information about domain names in a central registry database. It

2146-459: Is nameless. The first-level set of domain names are the top-level domains (TLDs), including the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), such as the prominent domains com , info , net , edu , and org , and the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Below these top-level domains in the DNS hierarchy are the second-level and third-level domain names that are typically open for reservation by end-users who wish to connect local area networks to

2220-411: Is not unusual for an end user to switch registrars, invoking a domain transfer process between the registrars involved, that is governed by specific domain name transfer policies. When a registrar registers a .com domain name for an end-user, it must pay a maximum annual fee of US$ 9.59 and for .net the maximum price for one year is set at $ 9.92 to VeriSign , the registry operator for com , and

2294-460: Is the DNS root zone , which is expressed as an empty label and can be represented in an FQDN with a trailing dot, such as somehost.example.com. . A trailing dot is generally implied and often omitted by most applications. Trailing dots are required by the standard format for DNS zone files , as well as to disambiguate cases where an FQDN does not contain any other label separators, such as the FQDNs for

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2368-427: Is the process of changing the designated registrar of a domain name. ICANN has defined a Policy on Transfer of Registrations between Registrars . The usual process of a domain name transfer is: After this process, the new registrar is the domain name's designated registrar. The process may take about five days. In some cases, the old registrar may intentionally delay the transfer as long as allowable. After transfer,

2442-493: Is to provide easily recognizable and memorizable names to numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource to be moved to a different physical location in the address topology of the network, globally or locally in an intranet . Such a move usually requires changing the IP address of a resource and the corresponding translation of this IP address to and from its domain name. Domain names are used to establish

2516-561: The ARPA domain serves technical purposes in the infrastructure of the Domain Name System. During the 32nd International Public ICANN Meeting in Paris in 2008, ICANN started a new process of TLD naming policy to take a "significant step forward on the introduction of new generic top-level domains." This program envisions the availability of many new or already proposed domains, as well as a new application and implementation process. Observers believed that

2590-514: The HTTP request header field Host: , or Server Name Indication . Critics often claim abuse of administrative power over domain names. Particularly noteworthy was the VeriSign Site Finder system which redirected all unregistered .com and .net domains to a VeriSign webpage. For example, at a public meeting with VeriSign to air technical concerns about Site Finder , numerous people, active in

2664-492: The IETF and other technical bodies, explained how they were surprised by VeriSign's changing the fundamental behavior of a major component of Internet infrastructure, not having obtained the customary consensus. Site Finder, at first, assumed every Internet query was for a website, and it monetized queries for incorrect domain names, taking the user to VeriSign's search site. Other applications, such as many implementations of email, treat

2738-564: The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Domain name In the Internet , a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites , email services and more. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and for application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general,

2812-436: The com , net , org , info domains and others, use a registry-registrar model consisting of hundreds of domain name registrars (see lists at ICANN or VeriSign). In this method of management, the registry only manages the domain name database and the relationship with the registrars. The registrants (users of a domain name) are customers of the registrar, in some cases through additional layers of resellers. There are also

2886-453: The IP address of a loopback interface, or the localhost name. Second-level (or lower-level, depending on the established parent hierarchy) domain names are often created based on the name of a company (e.g., bbc .co.uk), product or service (e.g. hotmail .com). Below these levels, the next domain name component has been used to designate a particular host server. Therefore, ftp.example.com might be an FTP server, www.example.com would be

2960-428: The Internet, create other publicly accessible Internet resources or run websites, such as "wikipedia.org". The registration of a second- or third-level domain name is usually administered by a domain name registrar who sell its services to the public. A fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is a domain name that is completely specified with all labels in the hierarchy of the DNS, having no parts omitted. Traditionally

3034-471: The ccTLDs combined. As of December 31, 2023, 359.8 million domain names had been registered. The right to use a domain name is delegated by domain name registrars , which are accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization charged with overseeing the name and number systems of the Internet. In addition to ICANN, each top-level domain (TLD)

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3108-537: The complete list of TLD registries and domain name registrars. Registrant information associated with domain names is maintained in an online database accessible with the WHOIS protocol. For most of the 250 country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), the domain registries maintain the WHOIS (Registrant, name servers, expiration dates, etc.) information. Some domain name registries, often called network information centers (NIC), also function as registrars to end-users. The major generic top-level domain registries, such as for

3182-438: The domain cannot be transferred again for 60 days, except back to the previous registrar. If an attempt is made to transfer a domain immediately before it expires, a transfer can in some cases take up to 14 days, meaning that the transfer may not complete before the registration expires. This could result in loss of the domain name registration and failure of the transfer. To avoid this, end users could either transfer well before

3256-618: The domain name for themselves. Network Solutions has been accused of this. In the United States, the Truth in Domain Names Act of 2003, in combination with the PROTECT Act of 2003 , forbids the use of a misleading domain name with the intention of attracting Internet users into visiting Internet pornography sites. Domain name registrar A domain name registrar must be accredited by

3330-440: The domain. This provides a reference for direct queries of domain data. Registration of a domain does not automatically imply the provision of DNS services for the registered domain. Most registrars do offer DNS hosting as an optional free service for domains registered through them. If DNS services are not offered, or the end-user opts out, the end-user is responsible for procuring or self-hosting DNS services. Registrars require

3404-591: The early network, each computer on the network retrieved the hosts file ( host.txt ) from a computer at SRI (now SRI International ), which mapped computer hostnames to numerical addresses. The rapid growth of the network made it impossible to maintain a centrally organized hostname registry and in 1983 the Domain Name System was introduced on the ARPANET and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 882 and RFC 883. The following table shows

3478-400: The end user into thinking that it is an official binding notice. Scam registrars go after domain names that are expiring soon or have recently expired. Domain name expiry dates are readily available via WHOIS. A drop catcher is a domain name registrar that offers the service of attempting to quickly register a given domain name for a customer if that name becomes available—that is, to "catch"

3552-430: The expiration date, or renew the registration before attempting the transfer. If a domain registration expires, irrespective of the reason, it can be difficult, expensive, or impossible for the original owner to get it back. After the expiration date, the domain status often passes through several management phases, often for a period of months; usually it does not simply become generally available. The introduction of

3626-404: The first five .com domains with the dates of their registration: and the first five .edu domains: Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages the top-level development and architecture of the Internet domain name space. It authorizes domain name registrars , through which domain names may be registered and reassigned. The domain name space consists of

3700-414: The first quarter of 2015, 294 million domain names had been registered. A large fraction of them are in the com TLD, which as of December 21, 2014, had 115.6 million domain names, including 11.9 million online business and e-commerce sites, 4.3 million entertainment sites, 3.1 million finance related sites, and 1.8 million sports sites. As of July 15, 2012, the com TLD had more registrations than all of

3774-509: The frequency of updates; and in whether their basic data is absolute numbers provided by registries, or daily changes derived from Zone files . The lists appear to all use at most 16 publicly available generic TLDs (gTLDs) that existed as of December 2009, plus .us. A February 2010 ICANN zone file access concept paper explains that most country code TLD (ccTLD) registries stopped providing zone files in 2003, citing abuse. Published rankings and reports include: ICANN registrar accreditation

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3848-470: The highest level of domain names of the Internet. Top-level domains form the DNS root zone of the hierarchical Domain Name System . Every domain name ends with a top-level domain label. During the growth of the Internet, it became desirable to create additional generic top-level domains. As of October 2009, 21 generic top-level domains and 250 two-letter country-code top-level domains existed. In addition,

3922-406: The interest of the Internet infrastructure component for which VeriSign was the steward. Despite widespread criticism, VeriSign only reluctantly removed it after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) threatened to revoke its contract to administer the root name servers. ICANN published the extensive set of letters exchanged, committee reports, and ICANN decisions. There

3996-445: The left of .com, .net, and the other top-level domains. As an example, in the domain example.co.uk , co is the second-level domain. Next are third-level domains, which are written immediately to the left of a second-level domain. There can be fourth- and fifth-level domains, and so on, with virtually no limitation. Each label is separated by a full stop (dot). An example of an operational domain name with four levels of domain labels

4070-448: The market but later were surpassed by rivals include Network Solutions and Dotster . Each ICANN-accredited registrar must pay a fixed fee of US$ 4,000 plus a variable fee. The sum of variable registrar fees is intended to total US$ 3.8 million. The competition created by the shared registration system enables end users to choose from many registrars offering a range of related services at varying prices. Domain registration information

4144-410: The new name space created, registrars use several key pieces of information connected with a domain: A domain name consists of one or more labels, each of which is formed from the set of ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens (a–z, A–Z, 0–9, -), but not starting or ending with a hyphen. The labels are case-insensitive; for example, 'label' is equivalent to 'Label' or 'LABEL'. In the textual representation of

4218-442: The new rules could result in hundreds of new top-level domains to be registered. In 2012, the program commenced, and received 1930 applications. By 2016, the milestone of 1000 live gTLD was reached. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) maintains an annotated list of top-level domains in the DNS root zone database. For special purposes, such as network testing, documentation, and other applications, IANA also reserves

4292-484: The owner of example.org could provide subdomains such as foo.example.org and foo.bar.example.org to interested parties. Many desirable domain names are already assigned and users must search for other acceptable names, using Web-based search features, or WHOIS and dig operating system tools. Many registrars have implemented domain name suggestion tools which search domain name databases and suggest available alternative domain names related to keywords provided by

4366-401: The price for a registration when ordered with other products such as web hosting services . The price for other gTLD registrations or renewals can vary. The maximum period of registration for a gTLD domain name is 10 years. Some registrars offer longer periods of up to 100 years, but such offers involve the registrar renewing the registration for their customer every 10 years by themselves. If

4440-544: The primarily used form for human-readable representations of a domain name. Dot-separated domain names are not used in the internal representation of labels in a DNS message but are used to reference domains in some TXT records and can appear in resolver configurations, system hosts files , and URLs . Web addresses typically use FQDNs to represent the host, as it ensures the address will be interpreted identically on any network. Relative hostnames are allowed by some protocols, including HTTP , but disallowed by others, such as

4514-502: The public, effectively establishing the retail arm of an industry with the registries being the wholesalers. NSI assimilated this model, which ultimately led to the separation of registry and registrar functions. In 1997, PGMedia filed an antitrust suit against NSI citing the DNS root zone as an essential facility, and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) was joined as a defendant in this action. Ultimately, NSI

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4588-493: The registrar is de-accredited or goes out of business the domain name will be transferred to another accredited registrar. The full 100 year registration on such a transferred domain may not apply due to ICANN having a maximum of ten years for a registration. Registration of a domain name establishes a set of name server records in the DNS servers of the parent domain, indicating the IP addresses of DNS servers that are authoritative for

4662-469: The registries for the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains (TLDs). In addition to the function of domain name registry operator, it was also the sole registrar for these domains. However, several companies had developed independent registrar services. In 1996, one such company, Ivan Pope 's company, NetNames , developed the concept of a standalone commercial domain name registration service that would sell domain registration and other associated services to

4736-604: The role of registrar for each of the TLDs was delegated to various universities (the University of Dortmund for .de , Kuwait University for .kw , etc.) and, via US government contracts, to private companies. As the internet expanded in the early 1990s, becoming more commercial and international, the US government decided it could no longer provide domain name management free of charge. From 1991 to 1999, Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) operated

4810-434: The root zone itself and any top-level domain . The length of each label must be between 1 and 63 octets , and the full domain name is limited to 255 octets, full stops included. A relative domain name is a domain name which does not include all labels. It may also be referred to as a partially-qualified domain name, or PQDN. Hostnames can be used as relative domain names. Dot-separated fully qualified domain names are

4884-446: The service of delegating a domain name to a user and providing a default set of name servers. Often, this transaction is termed a sale or lease of the domain name, and the registrant may sometimes be called an "owner", but no such legal relationship is actually associated with the transaction, only the exclusive right to use the domain name. More correctly, authorized users are known as "registrants" or as "domain holders". ICANN publishes

4958-420: The services offered, a feature that is used to manage the traffic of large, popular websites. Web hosting services , on the other hand, run servers that are typically assigned only one or a few addresses while serving websites for many domains, a technique referred to as virtual web hosting . Such IP address overloading requires that each request identifies the domain name being referenced, for instance by using

5032-528: The specification of usually at least two name servers. The Domain Name System Security Extensions ( DNSSEC ) is a suite of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specifications for securing certain kinds of information provided by the Domain Name System. This involves a registrar processing public key data and creating DS records for addition into the parent zone. All new GTLD registries and registrars must support DNSSEC. A domain name transfer

5106-511: The supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), although there had been several testbed registrars using the system since March 11, 1999. Since then, over 900 registrars have entered the market for domain name registration services. Of the registrars who initially entered the market, many have continued to grow and outpace rivals. GoDaddy is the largest registrar. Other widely used registrars include Enom , Tucows , and Webcentral . Registrars who initially led

5180-539: The user. The business of resale of registered domain names is known as the domain aftermarket . Various factors influence the perceived value or market value of a domain name. Most of the high-prize domain sales are carried out privately. Also, it is called confidential domain acquiring or anonymous domain acquiring. Intercapping is often used to emphasize the meaning of a domain name, because DNS names are not case-sensitive. Some names may be misinterpreted in certain uses of capitalization. For example: Who Represents ,

5254-474: The valid DNS character set by an encoding called Punycode . For example, københavn.eu is mapped to xn--kbenhavn-54a.eu. Many registries have adopted IDNA. The first commercial Internet domain name, in the TLD com , was registered on 15 March 1985 in the name symbolics.com by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By 1992, fewer than 15,000 com domains had been registered. In

5328-574: The websites of many organizations on just a few servers. The hierarchical DNS labels or components of domain names are separated in a fully qualified name by the full stop (dot, . ). The character set allowed in the Domain Name System is based on ASCII and does not allow the representation of names and words of many languages in their native scripts or alphabets. ICANN approved the Internationalized domain name (IDNA) system, which maps Unicode strings used in application user interfaces into

5402-465: Was divided into two main groups of domains. The country code top-level domains (ccTLD) were primarily based on the two-character territory codes of ISO-3166 country abbreviations. In addition, a group of seven generic top-level domains (gTLD) was implemented which represented a set of categories of names and multi-organizations. These were the domains gov , edu , com , mil , org , net , and int . These two types of top-level domains (TLDs) are

5476-568: Was granted immunity from antitrust litigation, but the litigation created enough pressure to restructure the domain name market. In October 1998, following pressure from the growing domain name registration business and other interested parties, NSI's agreement with the United States Department of Commerce was amended. This amendment required the creation of a shared registration system that supported multiple registrars. This system officially commenced service on November 30, 1999, under

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