Encyclopedia / Domain & network
Domain name
The human-readable name for a site, like example.com.
You rent a domain from a registrar for a year at a time. The top-level domain (.com, .dev, .ai) and the name together make it unique. Subdomains (blog.example.com) are free once you own the domain.
Related terms
Where it shows up in a page load
- Step 1: You type a URL. The browser splits https://example.com/work into a scheme (https), a host (example.com) and a path (/work). Before anything else it needs to know which machine example.com is.
Watch the full request journey →
More in Domain & network
How a name like example.com turns into a secure connection to a real machine.