Domain and Sub-domain Setup
What is a domain?
AKA "website address" or "URL", the domain name of a website is the ENTIRE website address (for example www.greypebbles.com). A domain name must be unique and after being registered needs to be renewed on a yearly basis.
What is a sub-domain?
Sub-domains are commonly used to divide portions of a website into categories. A sub-domain is the part of the website address before the domain name.
For example: http://support.greypebbles.com.
In this example “support” is a sub-domain of the domain “http://www.greypebbles.com”.
A subdomain, unlike a domain name, is not registered anywhere because it is associated with a domain name only. Sub-domains at Grey Pebbles are free to any client currently on our Platinum and Gold hosting packages.
| Why are sub-domains used? |
| Sub-domain makes the URLs shorter and nicer. |
| It allows website owners to categorize the content of the website. |
| It also helps in improving the search engine rankings as most of the search engines treat the subdomain as a separate website address. (Your website stats will include the statistics of the sub-domains.) |
| One of the advantages of using subdomain is that the website can be broken down into smaller pieces without losing the brand image associated with the domain name. |
| Sub-domains can be easily moved to another server if the category gets very popular. |
| No extra charge for subdomain setup. |
A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control on the Internet, based on the Domain Name System (DNS).
Domain names are used in various networking contexts and application-specific naming and addressing purposes. They are organized in subordinate levels (subdomains) of the DNS root domain, which 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, net 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 that wish to connect local area networks to the Internet, run web sites, or create other publicly accessible Internet resources. The registration of these domain names is usually administered by domain name registrars who sell their services to the public.
Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, or hostnames. Hostnames are the leaf labels in the domain name system usually without further subordinate domain name space. Hostnames appear as a component in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for Internet resources such as web sites (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 DomainKeys used to verify DNS domains in e-mail systems, and in many other Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).
An important purpose of domain names is to provide easily recognizable and memorizable names to numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource (e.g., website) 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.
(Article supplied by Wikipedia) |
