Everything You Need to Know about URLs
A business’s website is one of its lifelines; it can either make or break your online presence. One of the most important parts of having a website, though, is owning your domain name. There are a lot of different choices for them, but do you know that at one point in history, they had their own individual uses and meanings?
Top-level Domains
We’ve all seen the endings of URLs such as .com, .net, and .org. These are the highest levels of domain names, and they end most website domains out there. The role of the top-level domain is to designate where in the DNS root zone the URL is located in the hierarchical namespace of the Domain Name System (DNS). For example, the domain name www.example.com would belong to the top-level domain, .com.
Traditionally, the three aforementioned top-level domains are the most common, and they used to have specific roles:
- .com was primarily used by commercial, or for-profit websites and organizations.
- .net was preferred by websites that concentrated on building networks.
- .org represented non-profit organizations.