Understanding domain names and their hierarchy are an interesting and great way to analyze the Internet highways that we knowingly or unknowingly tread on a basis. With this article, I also take an aim at busting some common domain jargon and make you understand this even far better.
TLD
TLD simply expands to Top Level Domain. To understand what a Top Level Domain is, you should first know the basic parts called labels. Let’s take the example of the following web address, webloggerz.com. In this case, ‘webgeek’ , ‘elletis’ and ‘.com’ are three distinct labels of a domain name. Here the ‘.com’ is a bit top-level domain, while the part ‘elletis‘ is called a hostname and ‘webgeek‘ is a subdomain of Elletis.
A top level domain constitutes one of the domains at the highest level in the working of the Internet’s hierarchy of the domain name system. The most prominent example of a TLD is the ‘.com’ domain. There are different types of TLDs as defined by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the governing body of all things related to Internet domain names. Let’s take a closer look at them.
gTLD
A gTLD or generic Top-Level Domain is a subset of TLDs that don’t have any specific geographic relevance to their audience, neither do they have any affinity towards any specific country or group. Popular examples of gTLDs include .com, .info, .net, .org domains. Absolutely anyone can buy and register a gTLD domain name from an ICANN-authorized registrar on a first-come first-served basis, you don’t need to show any proof while registering since there’s nothing of special relevance to gTLDs. They are one can say, the most common commodities of the domain name space.
CcTLD
This is a special type of top-level domain CcTLD or country code top-level domain, meant as you can imagine, for identifying websites or organizations from specific countries. Where we saw no restriction on the size of gTLDs above, rules specific to ccTLDs dictate them to be no longer than two characters longer. You can see it in examples such as nike.in (Nike for India), google.cn (Google in China). The rules and requirements for purchasing a CcTLD differ from one country to another: for e.g., anyone can just buy a ‘.in’ domain name without showing any proof, whereas ‘.de’ and ‘.ca’ registrations for German and Canadian ccTLD, respectively require you to prove you belong to those nations.
GeoTLD
A geographic top-level domain or GeoTLD is slightly in concept to the above mentioned ccTLD. Just as ccTLD are specific to countries, GeoTLD are specific to broader (yet specific) geographies. For example .asia is an ideal example of a GeoTLD. So is the .eu for European Union – although .eu is classified as a ccTLD, it technically doesn’t correspond to any particular country within the European Union. A whole list of GeoTLDs has been proposed by several domain registrars to ICANN, awaiting its approval.
sTLD
An interesting sub-set of TLDs , an sTLD or sponsored top-level domain is accredited towards certain private or government organizations which fund them. They can restrict and control the entry of new domains registered under these special digital zones. Think of them, as private, invitation-only clubs.
Prominent examples of sTLDs include ‘.gov‘ ( The United States government), .mil (The United States Army), .edu ( sponsored by EDUCAUSE ), .mobi (sponsored by dotMobi), and so on and so forth. As you can see from the examples above, all the TLDs have a sponsor or a group backing it, but some, such as ‘.edu’ are for non-profit use.
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