A domain or domain name, is an identifier that represents a unique subset of the Domain Name System (DNS). Having your own domain name is a prerequisite for accessing many of the features offered by the Internet, such as your website and email.
A domain name consists of characters separated by a dot. The character to the right of the dot represents the Top Level Domain (TLD), the highest level of the DNS hierarchical structure. There are many TLDs in the world today. Each country is entitled to its own ISO country code TLD, and a number of generic TLDs have been introduced, the most well-known being COM, NET and ORG. Estonia’s Top Level Domain is .EE. The European Union´s TLD is .EU and the Finnish TLD is .FI.
A good example of a common domain name is ZONE.EE. If you read the domain name from right to left, the first character is the Top Level Domain EE, which stands for Estonia, and the second character is the word ZONE. The registrant of this domain is Zone Media OÜ and it contains the company trademark Zone. Such a two-character domain name is also known as a second level subdomain.
Often we also come across domain names lower down in the DNS hierarchy, such as www.zone.ee. In addition to the top-level domain EE and the second-level subdomain zone, this domain also contains the third-level subdomain www.
On the Internet, it has become customary for the third level subdomain containing the WWW character and the second level subdomain to also stand for the server hosting the website associated with the domain. To access the Zone Media website, all you need to do is type zone.ee or www.zone.ee into the address bar of your browser.
Each domain name must be unique. In general, a domain name must meet the following conditions:
- the domain name can be a minimum of 2 characters long.
- The minimum length of an INFO domain is 3 characters.
- the domain name may contain letters from ‘a-z’ , numbers from ‘0-9’ and a hyphen ‘-‘.
- the domain name can be up to 63 characters long
- the domain name must not start with a hyphen
- some domain names may not contain a hyphen as the third and fourth character.
The domain names of computers or servers connected to the Internet are characterized by the fact that their numeric IP addresses are associated with them in the DNS system. For example, the domain name www.zone.ee is associated with the IP address 217.146.65.92. It is possible to go even deeper in the DNS hierarchy. For example, it is possible to create a domain name of five.four.three.two.one.zone.ee and this would be a perfectly correct domain name.