What is a Top Level Domain Name?

By: Aleem Khan
Submitted: 2007-01-17 13:08:07
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By now, you should know what a domain name is. It is YourNAMEin.com where "YourNAMEin" is of course replaced by your name.

Now ".com" is called an extension, and there are many extensions like it. You may have heard about ".net" and ".org" and so on. However, ".com" is king and will be for quite a while because it is easy to remember and has been widely marketed.

Having acknowledged the king, we must mention the queens and princesses and princes. (Many say the queen is where the real power lies. Wink, wink, nodge, nodge.) The point is that there are other extensions that are equally powerful. Every country has its own extension and also has control of its own extension. So for example, the United Kingdom has ".uk"; Samoa has ".gs" and Trinidad and Tobago has ".tt"

The international internet authorities structured things in such a way that each country determines how to sell its extensions and to whom. For example, the UK decided it's not going to sell any top level domain names to the public. Samoa decided it's going to sell only top level domain names and Trinidad and Tobago decided it's going to sell both top and secondary level domain names. So what's a top and secondary level domain name?

Let's stick to the examples to explain. The UK will only sell secondary level domain name i.e. ".co.uk" and ".org.uk" and so on. Any name you buy from the UK registrar must end in one of these extensions. You cannot buy "JohnSmith.uk" (until and unless the UK changes their rules, of course). So note, there are two levels in there. There is the ".co" and the ".uk"

Samoa on the other hand sells only top level domain names. This means that you can only buy names like "bn.gs" or anything else you want ending in ".gs"

Then there's Trinidad and Tobago which sells both. Trinidad & Tobago reserved a couple of secondary level domain names such as ".co.tt" and ".net.tt" and so on and you can buy those for a smaller fee than the plain old ".tt"

In other words, there is a price difference in what Google would have paid for "google.tt" and what Breaking News would have paid for "news.co.tt" The latter is a secondary level domain name and the former is a primary or top level domain name.

Finally, we must treat the topic of subdomains. If you were one of the few people in the world with a four-letter top level domain name like "bn.gs" you could create subdomains. What is a subdomain? A sub-domain, as the name implies, is a sub of the domain name acquired from a registrar like the International Internet Authority. This is how you can get names like "breakingnews.bn.gs" It is actually a subdomain and not exactly a secondary level domain like "news.co.tt" although they both have two dots. "News.co.tt" is a secondary level domain name because it was acquired from an official registrar and that registrar sells names ending in ".co.tt" while the owner of ".bn.gs" acquired this name from a registrar and then created a subdomain called "breakingnews.bn.gs".

Just like Japanese, one can keep creating subdomains as far to the left as one likes. So for example, one can create "pink.blue.white.green.bn.gs" It's just that domain names were created so people wouldn't have to memorise IP numbers, so why make such a long subdomain that no one would remember. What is an IP number, you ask? That's another article on its own.

What you need to know for now is that it is highly important to Get Your Name in .com before someone else does because this is a huge business like you wouldn't believe; and a safe and reliable place to do just that is at InternationalInternetAuthority.com. It's not the cheapest place to do it but at least you're sure you won't be crying later as many do when they buy from the wrong people, and that's important in this business.

Aleem Khan is an accredited Internet Expert with the InternationalInternetAuthority.com, a safe and reliable place to get Your NAME in .com

Article source: Expert Articles

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