Real Web Hosting Reviews

Web Hosting Jargon Explained, Part 1: Domain Name

What is a domain name, a subdomain or a domain alias? Does my plan allows me to host multiple website, or multiple domain names? Get an explanation of the technical terms regarding domain names.

Domain Name

Domain names are used in URLs to identify a particular Web site. For example, in the URL http://www.reviews-web-hosting.com/articles/index.html, the domain name is reviews-web-hosting.com. Every domain name has a suffix that indicates which top level domain (TLD) it belongs to. There are only a limited number of TLDS. The following are examples of top level domains:

• com - Commercial business
• gov - Government agencies
• edu - Educational institutions
• org - Organizations (nonprofit)
• net - Network organizations
• us - United States

The most popular domain suffix is .com, even for non-commercial entities. Each country has it own suffix (ca for Canada, mx for Mexico, etc.). The registration of some of these suffixes is restricted, such as .gov, others are available to anybody (.net, .com. .org, etc.).

Free Domains

Some web hosting companies offer one or more free domain name registrations with their plans. If you decide to take such an offer, you should verify with the company:

• How long is it free: for the first year only, or for the duration of your plan?
• Who is the legal owner of the free domain(s): you, or the Web hosting companies?
• Can you transfer your domain name to another company at any time?

It is nice to save money by getting a free domain, but you must ensure the Web hosting company cannot use it to force you into their plan forever. For this reason, many webmasters prefer to register their domain names themselves, independently from their Web hosting plan.

Additional Domain

If you do not already own a domain name, you can buy one either with your hosting plan, or with any other registrar. You may also decide to host the same website under different domain names (see domain alias), for example http://www.reviews-web-hosting.com/ and http://www.reviews-hosting.net/ lead to the same website.

External Domains

Some Web hosting companies put restrictions of the number of domains not registered with them that point to your hosting plan. For example, if you buy your hosting plan with company Host, and ten domains names with company Domains, Host may only allow you to point five of these ten domains to your website. See also domain alias.

Subdomains

In the address http://www.reviews-web-hosting.com/, www is a subdomain. Having a subdomain in the web site address is not required, for example http://reviews-web-hosting.com/ works quite well. Subdomains are useful when a website appears across several computers or to redirect part of the web site to a third party. Here are two examples:

• http://mail.reviews-web-hosting.com/ to redirect to a webmail
• http://blog.reviews-web-hosting.com/ to redirect to an external blog service such as Blogger or Wordpress

Most websites do not require the use of subdomains, besides the usual www always included in the web hosting plans.

Multiple Websites

In addition to having several domain names (reviews-web-hosting.com, reviews-web-hosting.net) pointing to the same Web hosting plan, you may want to display different content for each of them. A plan with multiple websites allows you to buy a single host for different websites. You do not need this feature if you want all your domain names to display the same content (see domain alias), or if you have a single domain name.

Domain Alias

Domain name aliases are additional domain names associated with your primary domain. For instance, the alias reviews-web-hosting.net redirects you to the primary domain name reviews-web-hosting.com, that is http://wwww.reviews-web-hosting.net/ which points to the same site as http://wwww.reviews-web-hosting.com/.

Domain aliases enable users to access the same Web site through a number of different addresses. For example, many companies register several similar domain names (such as common misspellings of their domain name, or different TLDs) and then use domain aliases to have all of the domain names point to the same site.

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