The domain name space

The domain name space

The hierarchical domain name system, organized into zones, each served by a name server.

The domain name space consists of a tree of domain names. Each node in the tree holds information associated with the domain name. The tree sub-divides into zones beginning at the root zone.
[edit] Parts of a domain name

A domain name consists of one or more parts, technically called labels, that are conventionally concatenated, and delimited by dots, such as example.com.

* The right-most label conveys the top-level domain; for example, the domain name www.example.com belongs to the top-level domain com.
* The hierarchy of domains descends from the right to the left label in the name; each label to the left specifies a subdivision, or subdomain of the domain to the right. For example: the label example specifies a subdomain of the com domain, and www is a subdomain of example.com. This tree of labels may consist of 127 levels. Each label may contain up to 63 ASCII characters. The full domain name may not exceed a total length of 253 characters.[1] In practice, some domain registries may have shorter limits.
* A hostname is a domain name that has at least one IP addresses associated. For example, the domain names www.example.com and example.com are also hostnames, whereas the com domain is not.
Top-level domains