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Most people rarely take the time to learn the exact difference between a website and a domain name, as everything is easily accessible via their browser. It’s all relatively simple. You open your browser, type the name of the website into the search bar, or enter a few keywords that spring to mind, and voilà – that’s pretty much all it takes to get where you need to go.
Not everyone needs to know this, but a domain name, a website and a URL are not the same thing. The typical end-user needs to know how to access and use their web browser to get the most out of their online browsing experience. However, when someone decides they want to launch an online project, that changes!
If you’ve never had a website before, figuring all this out can be more than a little confusing. But don’t worry – “What’s the difference between a website, a domain name and a URL?” is a common question from beginners, and we’re here to answer it for you.
What is a website?
A website consists of a multitude of files, folders and data, and in order for the website to be viewed, this information must be hosted on a server (computer) to which visitors have unrestricted access. This is where companies such as aWh, which offer web hosting services, play a role on the internet. A web server is somewhat similar to a home computer, but it is actively maintained and built specifically to store web content. It is always switched on and is constantly connected to the internet, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!
To create a website, you need a few things:
- A domain name (for example, mynewwebsite.hu)
- The domain registrar or domain service provider
- A server or web hosting provider
- Digital content – the text, images, videos and other media that visitors will see when they visit your website. These are often developed for you by a web designer, although this is not always necessary given the availability and ease of use of many website builder applications.
Let’s finish with an example to make sure you’ve got the gist of it!
Imagine, if you like, a website as a physical file consisting of various pieces of paper, images and the folders that hold it all together. This file is usually stored in a filing cabinet. In this scenario, the filing cupboard is similar to a web hosting server, which stores the website in the same way that the cupboard stores physical files.
Of course, this is just an example, and the reality is a little more complicated than that. Your website is much more like a living organism – the connection between the website files, the web hosting and the domain name is crucial to its healthy functioning. If any one of these three is not working as it should, your website will not appear in the browser!
What is a domain name?
We’ve previously discussed how websites are similar to physical files stored in a filing cabinet, to make the example a little less dry than it might otherwise have been. Although we could continue with this analogy, for the sake of variety it’s better to shake things up a bit with a different comparison. Let’s imagine for a moment that a website’s server is like a house, and the website itself is everything that makes the house habitable. And then there’s the domain name. What do you think that might be? None other than the house’s address.
When a computer communicates with another computer, it does so in much the same way as we humans travel from one place to another. We set off from a starting point, then follow the roads and directions to our final destination. Computers behave in exactly the same way. To reach their desired destination, they need an addressing system that distinguishes one computer or server from another.
Whilst we use street and town names to navigate the world, computers use what are known as IP addresses, which look something like this: 172.67.138.47
Computers have no trouble identifying and remembering the numbers that make up IP addresses. People, however, find this process very frustrating, and it is almost impossible. Can you imagine having to keep a record of the IP addresses of every website you visit, just so you can visit them? It’s a logistical nightmare just to think about, but what’s even funnier is that this is exactly how things started out on the internet!
Ultimately, thanks to human ingenuity – inspired either by efficiency or laziness – and much like many of humanity’s past innovations, the internet was transformed and the DNS system was successfully introduced. Nowadays, nobody needs to memorise IP addresses to access the websites they want. Instead of this archaic method, we now use the DNS system. Computers translate IP addresses into domain names, thereby providing a more user-friendly version of IP addresses behind the scenes.
Some examples of domain names:
- wikipedia.org
- youtube.com
- oszk.hu
A domain name consists of three main parts: the root domain, the top-level domain and the second-level domain.
Let us explain these very important points to you:
The root domain is the main web address in its entirety. (e.g. mywebsite.hu)
A top-level domain, also known as a TLD, is the suffix or extension associated with a website (e.g. .com, .org, .net and so on).
A second-level domain is the name of the website (e.g. mywebsite) preceding the TLD (e.g. .com).
When registering a domain name, it is essential to bear the TLD in mind so that it better serves your purposes.
There are over a thousand TLDs, but most people are only familiar with the most common ones. The vast majority of TLDs are used by less than 0.1 per cent of websites. TLDs are categorised in various ways. Some, for example, are country-specific, such as .us (for the United States). Region-related extensions fall into the category of country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). And there are also TLDs that indicate the content of a website, such as .casino or .apartments. The non-profit organisation ICANN regulates which new TLDs are brought to market.
What is a URL?
A URL (also known as a Universal Resource Locator) is a complete web address used to locate a specific web page. Whilst the domain is the name of the website, the URL leads to any of the pages that make up the website. Every URL contains the domain name and other necessary components required to locate the specific page or content that a person is searching for.
When you visit a webpage on the World Wide Web, your computer uses HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to download the page from another computer somewhere on the internet. Casual users rarely notice them, but both HTTP (or http://) and HTTPS (https://) are ways of accessing a URL. If you look at most URLs, you’ll see that they all begin with either HTTP or HTTPS. Whether the URL uses HTTP or HTTPS, this tells the browser to use HTTP or HTTPS to retrieve the webpage associated with that URL.
HTTP was invented alongside HTML to create the first interactive, text-based web browser: the original World Wide Web. The protocol remains one of the primary tools for using the internet today. We’d be lost without it!
HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, HTTP over SSL and HTTP Secure) is a secure communication protocol that is ideal for a wide range of applications. HTTPS consists of communication via HTTP over a connection encrypted using TLS (Transport Layer Security) or its predecessor, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). The primary purpose of HTTPS is to authenticate the website being visited, as well as to protect the privacy and integrity of the data exchanged.
Although there is more we could say on this topic, why not take a look at our existing HostArmada article on HTTPS and SSL, which you can find here, if you’d like to know more!
Here are a few examples of URLs:
If you have a specific URL, you can use it to go straight to where you want to go, rather than having to navigate through the website from the start. You can also provide a direct link to an image, video or anything similar.
There isn’t much else to say when it comes to URLs. Nevertheless, we felt it was important to mention them so that our customers can better understand the differences and navigate the internet and web hosting services much more easily.