Acquiring a domain name is an essential part of setting up a web page that will not only uniquely anchor itself to you but essentially determine quickly and easily what your company does.

The domain names itself is made up of different parts, called labels, which are separated by dots. The furthest right is the top level domain which is most commonly the dot com. The hierarchy then subdivides down from the right into sub domains each divided by a dot, e.g. www.amazon.com. There can be anything up to 127 labels but the total limitation is no more that 253 characters and some domain registries may insist on less than that.

With the growth of the internet, other generic categories of top level domains were added such as .gov, .int and .edu. which were ascribed to certain government agencies, universities and international organisations. Second level domains could be added to these to denote country of origin such as .org.uk.

Second levels are directly to the left of the top level .com, .net, .edu etc. and generally describe or refer to the organisation. For example Wikipedia in wikipedia.org or Nottingham in Nottingham.ac.uk would be in this category as would the company or service that the domain name is linked to, a prime example being microsoft.com.

Third levels again move left of second and first level domain names and so the domain levels go on to fourth, fifth and sixth but with the length limitations as mentioned above. Of course, ‘www’ is the World-Wide Web but other third level domains such as ftp may denote a different server or mail being an email server.

At Heart Internet we can provide a comprehensive search for established and existing domain names and can advise clients on useful substitutes if the name they want is already in use.