Components of a Domain Name

A guide to the components of a domain name

The components of a domain name are simply its different parts, separated by dots. Each part has a job.

Think of a postal address. The house number, street and town work together to help someone find the right place. The parts of a domain name help computers find the right place online.

Take my.wesh.uk. It has three parts: my, wesh and uk. We’ll explain what each one does, then show you how a domain name fits into website and email addresses.

Grab a cuppa. We’ll take it one dot at a time.

Start at the end: the domain extension

In wesh.uk, the .uk at the end is called the domain extension.

Think of the country written on an envelope. It helps sort the post into the right group before anyone looks for the street or house. A domain extension does a similar job: it tells computers which group of names to look in.

Some extensions are linked to countries. .uk is the UK’s ending, while .fr is France’s. Others, such as .com, .org and .shop, aren’t tied to one country.

The technical name for an ending such as .uk is a top-level domain, often shortened to TLD. If you see those letters, that’s what they mean.

You choose an available extension when you register your domain. Some have rules about who can use them. You can’t just invent an ending and hope the internet plays along.

An ending is only a clue, though. A .uk name alone doesn’t prove that a business is based in the UK or that its website is trustworthy.

The name you choose

In wesh.uk, wesh is the name we chose. Put it together with the .uk ending and you have the complete domain name: wesh.uk.

Think of a street name. There are plenty of High Streets around the country, so you need the rest of the address to know which one you want. The ending matters in a domain name too: wesh.uk, wesh.com and wesh.co.uk are three different names.

Each needs its own registration. Registering one doesn’t automatically give you the others. Securing the versions that matter to your business helps prevent someone else from registering those same names.

The name you choose can include letters, numbers and hyphens (-), but no spaces. A hyphen can go between other characters, but not at the beginning or end.

Keep it short and easy to spell. You’ll thank yourself the first time you read it out over the phone.

What does a subdomain do?

Think of wesh.uk as our business name. A subdomain gives a particular part of the business its own address while keeping that name. It can run separately from our main website, even somewhere else entirely.

At WESH UK, we use:

my.wesh.uk for our client area, where you manage your account.

chat.wesh.uk to book a chat with us.

The extra word goes before our domain name, with a dot between them. It helps you get straight to the bit you need, without wandering around looking for someone to ask.

You don’t need to register a whole new domain each time, either. The service behind it might still have its own bill, mind.

It does need to be set up properly, though. Adding shop to the front won’t build an online shop for you. Putting a “Shop” sign on an empty room doesn’t put anything on the shelves!

Do you still need www?

You don’t normally need to type www at the start of a website address. For ours, wesh.uk will do nicely. Saves you saying “double-u, double-u, double-u” down the phone, too.

Those letters stand for World Wide Web, and www is a subdomain, just like my in my.wesh.uk.

Some websites still include it, but you can happily use the shorter version on your business cards, emails and van, provided your website works without it.

Think of it like telling a taxi driver you’re going to “The Red Lion pub”. If they know the Red Lion, you can leave “pub” off. You’re still going to the same place.

Your web designer or hosting company should make sure both versions work, with one automatically forwarding visitors to the other. That forwarding is called a redirect.

Why does .co.uk have an extra part?

You’ve probably seen plenty of addresses ending in .co.uk. So what’s that extra co doing in there?

Think of .uk as a filing cabinet for UK domain names. Inside it are drawers, including one labelled co. A name such as wesh.co.uk goes in that drawer.

With wesh.uk, our name sits directly under .uk, without that extra drawer in between.

That’s also where the technical talk about “levels” comes from. In wesh.co.uk, we count from the right:

• uk is the top level — our filing cabinet.
• co is the second level — the drawer.
• wesh is the third level — our file inside it.

You’ll commonly hear .co.uk called a domain extension, which is perfectly understandable when you’re choosing a name.

The bit to remember is that wesh.uk and wesh.co.uk are separate domain names. Each needs its own registration, and you can register either without buying the other.

For your business, securing both versions can help protect your brand. Otherwise, someone else could register the other one — a bit like another business opening down the road with the same name above the door. Plenty of room for confusion there.

What does https:// mean?

In https://my.wesh.uk/, the https:// at the beginning tells your browser to use a secure connection to the website.

Think of sending a letter in a locked box instead of on a postcard. With the postcard, anyone handling it can have a nose at what you’ve written. The locked box keeps the contents private while they travel.

HTTPS does something similar. It scrambles the information travelling between your browser and the website, so someone intercepting it can’t simply read it. That scrambling is called encryption.

You’d want that protection when entering a password or filling in a form. Nobody needs your private details being passed around like gossip down the pub.

The S stands for secure. You may also see http://, without the S, which doesn’t provide that encryption.

Neither is part of the domain name. In our example, the registered domain is still wesh.uk. The complete web address, https://my.wesh.uk/, is called a URL.

One thing to watch, though: HTTPS protects the connection. It doesn’t prove the business behind the website is honest. Crooks can use HTTPS too, so always check you’re on the website you intended to visit.

Does ftp at the front work the same way?

You might come across FTP when uploading files to a website. It stands for File Transfer Protocol, which is a set of rules computers use to move files between them.

The slightly confusing bit is that ftp can appear in two places, doing different jobs:

ftp.wesh.uk would be a subdomain, just like my.wesh.uk. It’s an address someone can set up.

ftp:// at the beginning tells your software to use FTP to connect.

Think of sending a parcel. The address on the label tells the delivery company where it’s going. Choosing Royal Mail or a courier tells them how you want it sent.

Same idea here: the domain gives the destination, while the bit before :// tells the software how to connect.

Simply sticking ftp in front of your domain won’t set up a file-transfer service, either. Writing “loading bay” on your garden shed doesn’t mean a delivery team will turn up.

If you need to upload website files, use the address and secure connection settings your hosting company provides. Plain FTP doesn’t encrypt your information, so the secure bit matters.

What are the bits after the domain name?

Ever copied a website link and wondered why it goes on for half a bloody mile? Some of those extra bits give directions once you’ve arrived at the website.

Here’s an example using a pretend shop on wesh.uk:

https://wesh.uk/shop/?sort=price#delivery

Imagine I’ve given you the address of a department store. That gets you to the building, but you still need to find what you came for.

/shop/ is the path. It points you towards a particular page or section. Think of the signs inside the store: shoes upstairs, furniture downstairs, that sort of thing.

?sort=price is the query string. Here, it’s asking the shop to arrange its products by price. The online equivalent of saying, “Show me the cheaper ones first, please. I’m not made of money.”

#delivery is the fragment. It can jump straight to the delivery information on that page. Handy when all you want to know is whether they’ll bring your new sofa up three flights of stairs.

Those instructions need to match something the website understands. The shop must be able to sort by price, and there must be a section marked delivery for the jump to work.

You’ll usually get these longer addresses by clicking links or choosing options on a page. Nobody expects you to sit there typing the whole lot.

And underneath all those directions, our domain is still wesh.uk.

Is a subdomain the same as a page or folder?

No, and we’ve had to untangle a few problems caused by putting one bit of software inside another website’s folders.

Let’s say wesh.uk runs on WordPress, and we want a shop using X-Cart, which is separate shopping software.

We could put X-Cart in a folder called shop, giving us wesh.uk/shop/. Looks tidy enough. Trouble is, the shop is now sitting underneath the WordPress website’s folders. Rules and settings for the main website can reach into that shop folder and interfere with it.

“But they’re different bits of software!”

They are, but imagine a wedding reception in a pub’s function room. You’ve hired your own caterers and brought your own DJ. Doesn’t change the fact that you’re using the pub’s building. Someone switches off the power behind the bar and there goes your wedding disco.

Instead, we can use shop.wesh.uk and give the shop its own main folder, outside the WordPress folders altogether.

That’s our function room in a separate building. Still part of the same pub chain, but with its own facilities. Next door, down the road, another town, it doesn’t matter. The shop could even use a different server or hosting company.

The important bit is where we’ve put the files. We’ve moved the shop out from underneath WordPress, so the rules in those WordPress folders no longer affect it.

We’ve fixed this exact sort of clash for clients. Once their shop was running in its own space on a subdomain, the two bits of software stopped tripping each other up.

Where does the domain fit in an email address?

Your domain can be used for email as well as your website. Let’s use a non-existent sales@wesh.uk as an example.

Think of posting a letter to a business, marked “For the attention of Sales”. The address gets it to the right business. The bit naming the department tells them whose desk it belongs on.

An email address does much the same job:

• sales identifies the mailbox or group you’re trying to reach. The technical name for this bit is the local part.
• @ means at and separates the two parts.
• wesh.uk is the domain name, which helps direct the message to the right email service.

The bit before @ could be someone’s name or a department, such as sales or support. You don’t need to register another domain every time somebody joins the business. They can have their own email address using the domain you already have.

You do need to set those addresses up, though. Buying a domain doesn’t automatically create mailboxes for everyone. You need an email service connected to it, with somewhere for those messages to go.

And leave https:// out of your email address. That belongs on a website address.

Use what you’ve learned to spot a dodgy address

Someone could stick “WESH UK” on the side of their van. Doesn’t mean they work for us, does it?

The same goes for a website address. Seeing a business name somewhere in it doesn’t mean you’ve reached that business.

Have a look at these:

my.wesh.uk belongs under our domain, wesh.uk. The my at the front is a subdomain.

wesh.uk.example.com is a made-up example of something quite different. The registered domain here is example.com. Our name has just been stuck on the front.

That’s the sort of trick crooks use. You recognise the name, assume everything’s fine and start typing your password. Meanwhile, you’re on somebody else’s website.

Check the full address before entering passwords or payment details. Remember that https:// protects the connection; it doesn’t tell you whether the person running the website is trustworthy.

If a link in a message looks suspicious, leave it alone. Open your browser and use a bookmark you trust, or type the business’s known website address yourself. You don’t have to use the entrance somebody’s conveniently put in front of you.

So, which bits do you actually register?

The name we register is wesh.uk.

Once we have it, we can set up addresses such as my.wesh.uk, create website pages such as wesh.uk/shop/ and arrange email addresses using @wesh.uk.

Those all use the same registered domain. We don’t buy another one every time we add a page, a department or a new member of staff.

The website and email services still need setting up, and they may have their own costs. Registering the name gives us the address to use; it doesn’t build the whole business behind it.

And if we also want wesh.co.uk or wesh.com, those are separate domain registrations. Similar names, separate bills, worth considering when protecting the name you’ve worked hard to build.