domain name & web hosting servers

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Diagram of Server Interaction: Accessing a Domain Name & Returning an IP Address

diagram of server interaction for domain name requests

Domain Names

“Domain Names translate IP addresses into language meaningful to humans from the numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices worldwide.”
—roughly repurposed from the Wikipedia definition

What does this mean? It means you take the IP (Internet Protocol) address of your website which is actually a number, and give it a meaningful name instead. One which humans can recall and retain.

Example: the IP address for an Example company might be something like: http://208.77.188.166. Since that would be extremely difficult to remember, long ago (1983) the powers that be (early Internet pioneers) created the Domain Name System to allow for easily recognizable URLs (Uniform Resource Locators—or Web Addresses).

Hence http://208.77.188.166 becomes http://www.example.com
And http://192.150.18.117 becomes http://adobe.com