When accessing a website, we enter an extension such as “example.com.” The “www” part is common to every website, so the part we need to remember is “example.com.” If we remember the part, we can provide direct access to the website. So, "example.com" is a domain name.

An IP address was required to access one device from another device or to browse the internet. But it's crazy to think that we need to remember the IP address of all websites. It might have been possible in the first years of the internet creation. It is impossible to write every website on the internet these days into a notebook. Domain names are user-friendly text that corresponds to IP addresses.

We can think of the IP address and domain name as a phone book. How many people are remain who memorize the phone numbers of everyone (thinking that there are many people you know)? Now everyone saves their phone numbers by name, and no one remembers the numbers. The domain name is like that. Everyone knows "google.com" if you ask for the IP address, very few know it. You need to search and look at the IP address.

The domain name converts to the IP address for us in the background by querying it from DNS by the browser.

In the picture above, we see the hierarchy for the domain name “en.wikipedia.org”. When we start from the end, we see an extension such as "org, com" that shows the purpose of the website. Before the extension, a particular name comes, like Wikipedia. Before the particular name, there is the "en" that gives the country code. The country code does not have to come before it in this way. It can also come to an end like "com.tr".

So what is this com, org, net? They all have a meaning. The meanings of the most commonly used extensions are as follows.

• .com = It means "commercial". Although it is normally used for commercial domains, we now see this extension on most sites.
• .net = It is a shortened version of the word “network”, which means network extension.
• .org = The first three letters of the word “organization” are used. Used for organizations.
• .info = It is the shortening of the word "information".
• .edu = It is a shortened version of the word "education". It is a domain extension used for educational institutions.
• .gov = It is a shortened version of the word "government". It is a domain name extension used for government organizations.
• .en = Represents sites in the English language. Every country has such an abbreviation.

We want to create a website and publish it publicly. For this purpose, we take the domain name. So we can use that name to enter our website. The places where we buy domain names actually rent the domain name. You can rent the domain name you want for 1 year or 10 years for how long you want. When choosing a domain name, I recommend that you choose a catchy name that is suitable for your website content. No matter how beautiful the website is, you don't want to have an irrelevant name that won't be remembered. When buying a domain name, you will encounter more than the extensions we mentioned above, you can choose the one that suits the price and the purpose of the website :)

---

Resources:

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name
• cloudflare.com/learning/dns/glossary/what-i..