• Back to Articles
• Comments
• Share on Twitter
• Share on LinkedIn
• Email to a friend
• Subscribe to RSS
• July 26, 2010

Website Domain Names Explained

The domain name system can be difficult to comprehend, but it's important for all website owners to have at least a basic understanding of how it works.

What is a website domain name and what does it do?

A domain name is the name of your website on the internet e.g. brightlabs.com.au. It is the internet's version of your physical workplace. You probably pay rent or some sort of fee to keep your physical workplace and in the same way you pay a renewal cost to keep your domain name.

Now let's say you want to call your friend. You'll need his phone number, but chances are you don't remember it. Instead you'll use your phone's address list or a phone book to match his name to a number. If your friend changes his phone number you just update the contact in your phone and continue to call him using his name.

Domain names work in very much the same way. Let's say you want to visit the Brightlabs website to be enlightened by their fantastic web design articles. Your computer will visit www.brightlabs.com.au (think of this as your friend's name). Your computer needs to know the IP address (phone number) for that domain so it can visit it. To do this, your computer requests information about that domain from a DNS server (phone book).

There are currently over 100 million domains registered. This is too many for one computer to keep track of, so the domains are grouped into registries.

Domain Name Registries

Here are a few common registries:

• The .com registry - operated by VeriSign (US)
• The .net registry - operated by VeriSign (US)
• The .au registry - operated by AusRegistry (AU)

This article will focus on the .au registry as that's the most common type of domain in Australia.

AusRegistry

AusRegistry maintains the official database of all .au domains. They provide wholesale services to their list of accredited registrars. Any domain registrar who can register .au domains and isn't on this list must be a reseller for someone who is.

AusRegistry provides a tool to look up a domain in their database and see what information is recorded for it. So let's take a look.

Go to AusRegistry's WhoIs page. Type in any Australian domain name, fill out the captcha form and click Submit. You will see the information AusRegistry has about this domain. Here's an example for google.com.au:

From this information we can see:

• That this information in AusRegistry was last modified in October 2009
• That Google used TPP Internet or one of its resellers to register the domain
• That the domain is currently active (status=ok)
• That the registrant (owner) is Google Inc and they're eligible to own that domain because they have the name Google trademarked
• The registrant's name and email address and the tech contact's name and email address
• The servers which hold the information about that domain

The nameservers are the important parts. When a computer wants to interact with a domain it must talk to one of the nameservers. For example, to send an email to a google.com.au address or visit www.google.com.au your computer will connect to one of these nameservers to determine the IP addresses of the mailserver or webserver.

In addition to the information above, each domain also has a password associated with it. The accredited registrar knows what it is and must use it to update any of the above domain details stored at AusRegistry. When a customer transfers a domain to another registrar, they must provide the domain password to the new registrar so the new registrar can update AusRegistry's records. The domain password usually isn't given to the customer when the domain is registered, but if the customer requests it the registrar will provide it.

Domain Nameservers and Record Types

The nameservers are physical servers somewhere that have technical information about your domain. The nameservers may or may not be hosted by the domain registrar. Most registrars will host them themselves unless the customer instructs otherwise. At Brightlabs, we host and manage our own nameservers.

Going back to our phone call analogy, it might help to think of a nameserver as the father of the person you're trying to contact. He knows everything about his child, including street address, phone and mobile number. But he only knows about his own children. In the same way, a nameserver only knows about a specific list of domains that it manages.

The nameservers hold DNS records, which are snippets of information about a domain. Some common ones are:

Looking up domain information

On Windows, open a command prompt and type in nslookup (Mac and Linux can do this too - type nslookup from a terminal). Then type:

set type=ns
brightlabs.com.au

This will list the nameservers (NS records) for brightlabs.com.au. You can swap ns in the first line for any other type of DNS record.

When you're done, type exit or just close the window.

Pro tip: Instead of getting down and dirty with the command line, there are web based lookup tools that do the same thing. ZoneEdit's lookup tool is easy to use - just fill out the domain name and record type on the left - but don't use it for too long or you'll go blind thanks to their background image.

Summary - Domain Names

• All .au domains are managed by AusRegistry
• AusRegistry keeps track of who/where the nameserver is that has information about that domain
• The nameserver can tell you what services the domain has (web, mail, etc) and where those servers are
• Those servers give you the actual content (eg. the webserver gives you the website and the mail server accepts mail)

Want to register a domain name? Feel free to contact us at Brightlabs and we'll be happy to help.