Who is the owner of all the .com domain names? When I’m paying for one, what does the company actually do in order to generate it for me? It’s not like they’ve already have it and they’ll just hand it over to me. It never existed in the first place.
In: Technology
It’s the equivilant of paying to be listed in the Yellow Pages, if you are old enough to be familiar with that.
All computers and other devices on a network get an IP address that is like a phone number and the internet is one giant network. If you want to communicate with a computer, you can use it’s IP address. You can even put the IP address directly into your web browser and it will work if the device has a webpage setup to answer anything that tries to “call” it. Think of that website as an answering machine.
When you say, type in the address for reddit in your browser, what you are really doing is consutling a directory to find out what IP address reddit has it’s stuff parked out. Theres another big computer somewhere that holds all the stuff for reddit (and possibly other websites, but reddit is big enough to have its own) called a server and you are actually contacting that computer and asking it to hook you up with it’s answering machine. It spits out the website you are using now and sends it to your computer.
So when you buy a .com (or any other domain) you are paying for the right to use that address to name whatever IP your website used and that domain name is listed as belonging to that IP in every address book online.
So, ip = phone number, domain name = name of the person using that phone number. Your web browser automatically looks up and dials the number for you and the other computer says hello by sending you a web page.
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