Domain name registration

History 

 The first commercial Internet domain name, in the TLD com, was registered on 15 March 1985 in the name symbolics.com by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 By 1992, fewer than 15,000 com domains had been registered.
 In December 2009, 192 million domain names had been registered. A large fraction of them are in the com TLD, which as of March 15, 2010 had 84 million domain names, including 11.9 million online business and e-commerce sites, 4.3 million entertainment sites, 3.1 million finance related sites, and 1.8 million sports sites. As of July 2012 the com TLD has more registrations than all of the ccTLDs combined.

Second-level and lower level domains

Below the top-level domains in the domain name hierarchy are the second-level domain (SLD) names. These are the names directly to the left of .com, .net, and the other top-level domains. As an example, in the domain example.co.uk, co is the second-level domain. Next are third-level domains, which are written immediately to the left of a second-level domain. There can be fourth- and fifth-level domains,

Top-level domains

The top-level domains (TLDs) such as com, net and org are the highest level of domain names of the Internet. Top-level domains form the DNS root zone of the hierarchical Domain Name System. Every domain name ends with a top-level domain label. When the Domain Name System was devised, in the 1980s, the domain name space was divided into two main groups of domains. The country code top-level domains (ccTLD) were primarily based on the two-character territory codes of ISO-3166 country abbreviations. In addition, a group of seven generic top-level domains

Purpose of a Domain Name System

Domain names serve as more easily memorable names for Internet resources such as computers, networks, and services. A domain name represents an Internet Protocol (IP) resource. Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, or host names. Host names are the leaf labels in the domain name system usually without further subordinate domain name space.

What Is a Domain Name

A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control on the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System (DNS). Any name registered in the DNS is a domain name. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general, a domain name represents an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet,