In this day and age, setting up your business online is very important if you want to reach a much larger audience and spread your brand name. Before you set up your online presence it is important to keep yourself informed so you can decide what is best for your brand. This is it is important to know the differences between URL and domain name. These two terms, domain name, and URL (Uniform Resource Locator) are very commonly used when it comes to the topic of the internet or websites and are even used interchangeably sometimes.
The main difference between domain name and URL is that domain name is a part of a URL which is a more user-friendly form of an IP address while URL provides the information location or the complete internet address of a website.
What is a URL
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When you want to access a familiar webpage, you probably just write the memorized address in the address bar of your web browser. Each website is uniquely identified by its unique name known as a URL. To get the wanted information the browser analyzes the URL and makes use of that information to make a copy of the requested website. The URL format depends heavily on the scheme which is why the browser starts with extracting the scheme information and with the help of the scheme it determines the rest of the URL.
URLs usually contain a path, a port, hostname, and a method.
- The method specifies the protocol that will be used to retrieve a certain document, for example, FTP, HTTPS, HTTP.
- Hostname string specifies the IP address or domain name of the computer where the needed information is located, or server for the information operates
- Port is a completely optional protocol number needed only if the most popular port is not used.
- A path is the location of the file or the file path in a server.
If you want to know more about the differences between a domain name and URL then click here.
What is a Domain Name?
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The domain name was introduced to simplify the IP address and make it more convenient and friendly for users. An IP address is a logical address assigned to every computer that is connected to at least one computer network. It basically identifies the location of a computer connected to the internet and also helps in routing the information. For example, 133.33.58.73 is an IP address. These are very complicated numbers to remember and even harder to say.
The DNS (Domain Name System) converts the domain name into its own specific IP address that the computer wants to communicate with. When some user enters your domain name into an address bar on a web browser, the browser uses the domain name to search and identify the correct IP address. After it has found the correct IP address, it passes the right website with that IP address to the user.
Subdomain (sometimes called child domain) is a domain with a prefix that is part of another main domain. For example, www.domain.com is a URL and the “www” is the subdomain part of the URL.
