Imagine everyone would use their passport number or telephone number instead of their name. If names did not exist, you would have to come up with some description - hence : a name - for any person. Otherwise, you would never be able to identify or refer to your acquaintances; not even your best friends. This would hardly be practical!

The same problem occurred in the early days of the internet and therefore, "domain names" were invented. Most computers connected to the internet are identified by a unique number, i.e. the IP-address (e.g. 193.111.95.31). IP-addresses, however, are not intuitive ; they do not really refer to anything, not even a geographical location for example. Furthermore, they are rather difficult to remember (try it for yourself: look away from this page and try to write down the IP-address mentioned above!).

When you enter the IP-address in your browser's url, you will get to the linked website. An IP-address is not only difficult to remember, but is also a FIXED number (e.g. when you switch to another webhosting company, you will get a new IP-address for your website).

Domain names are an intuitive way to name and find websites and to make it easy to remember them. Every domain name replaces a meaningless series of figures (= an IP-address) by an easy word or expression. At least, this is the theory! In practice however, domain names can sometimes still be rather long and/or very vague.

The construction of a domain name.

Let's take a closer look at a domain name. As an example, we will use this website's domain name, i.e. combell.com or combell.be, whichever is displayed in your browser's address bar.

.be (or .com) is the top(-level) domain, under which our domain was registered. There are many different top domains (also called extensions), ranging from commercial (.com) to non-profit (.org). There are also country-related extensions, e.g. France (.fr) or Italy (.it). Each domain name is registered under a certain top domain or domain extension. Both words "top domain" and "extension" mean the same.

The name of our domain is COMBELL. This part can be freely choosen - well... if still available of course. This name was created when we registered our domain name and we picked it because it was the company name. (duh!)

Name + Top domain = domain name. If you would ask us our domain name, we would answer "combell.com".

One of the biggest advantages of a domain name is that it is unique. I can be 100% sure that no-one else has the same domain name, because all domain names are registered in one central database. Each record in that database has to be unique. That is also why some domain names have become very valuable.

Below some domain name examples which you might already know. They belong to well-known companies or organisations.

combell.com
yahoo.com
fgov.be