Ubuntu Unleashed 2014 Edition: Covering 13.10 and 14.04,Ninth Edition

Understanding Domain Names

Simply put, a domain name is a string of characters that is used to represent an IP address. Domain names are intended to be easier to remember than strings of numbers. Generally, they are set up as a set of letters separated by dots. Each of these sets of letters is called a label. The label on the far right denotes the widest group, or top-level domain (TLD). Each label to the left is a subdomain of the one to the right of it. Here is an example: news.google.com.

Here we see three labels:

The top level refers to the top-level domain, in this case com. Other top-level domains include the original set of com, edu, ...