Why is it that .com is such a widely used suffix to websites, what does it stand for and why does it matter what the suffixes are when the DNS server converts the websites to their respective IP addresses anyways?
In: Technology
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> why does it matter what the suffixes are when the DNS server converts the websites to their respective IP addresses anyways?
To answer the second part of your question, it matters because there are more than one suffix and a name doesn’t have to be unique across all suffixes. For example, dc.com, dc.gov and dc.edu all go to very different sites.
Similarly, sometimes a given site uses multiple suffixes to disambiguate aspects of their services, especially across .com and .org, but also by country such as amazon.ca vs amazon.co.uk.
The suffix part is called a top-level domain or TLD. There are over 1,000 TLDs including:
* The original edu, com, gov, int, mil, net and org
* The internal and testing oriented local and localhost
* The national TLDs (two-character country codes such as us and uk)
* The sundry new business and category domains such as academy and accountant.
[Here’s a comprehensive list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains).
IIRC, .com is short for commercial, the original idea being that most business are commercial ventures, or something to that effect. The suffix should, in theory, allow you to differentiate what types of websites there are (com and biz for businesses, org for nonprofit, me for personal, tv and UK for country codes to denote Transylvanian or UK websites, etc). The suffix allow multiple entities to use the same name for their website, I.e. Linux.com vs linux.org instead of being forced to come up with a new website name because the .com version was already taken.
On a related sidenote, to help prevent competition from using their name, I have seen many companies buy up all the alternative names (biz, org, blog, xxx, me, etc) to prevent others fron using them against them.
Hopefully this helps!
The suffixes also matter for reputation even if indeed technically it doesn’t matter whether a domain is website.com, website.info, website.biz
.com has a better “reputation” for SEO purposes, it is seen as more trustworthy by search engines like Google etc….so that .com domains usually rank better in the search engines. (There are many more factors, like domain age, how often it changed owners, this and that, but you get the idea).
So if someone wants to make a new website, it is simply better and looks more professional to use .COM rather than have a site like politics-news.info or something which looks already spammy.
Top Level Domains (TLD) are like private clubs, some with very strict rules on who can be a member – .gov, .mil – and some pretty chill about who can join – .com, .net. The Domain Naming Servers (DNS) don’t care what the TLD is as long as they know how to get the mapping to the IP address.
As a website builder it is your choice which club you want to be member of, buy the ‘membership’ from the club owners (domain registrars or resellers), and then update the DNS config to point to your website.
.com historically represented ‘commercial’ but now is available more generally to everyone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
I’m not sure if anyone really answered the second part of your question, but the answer is that DNS is a distributed system. Besides providing handy organization, the root domains provide a way to divide up the work of resolving names to multiple points. It’s not so big of a deal now because of improvements to DNS and the overall advancement of technology.
As an added note, it’s really important to learn to read a URL to avoid fake sites.
It’s all about the slashes.
For example: [https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/blahblahblah](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/blahblahblah)
The domain, what is going to actually translate into an actual IP address, is between // and the first single /. In this case, “[www.reddit.com](https://www.reddit.com)”. The stuff after the first single / is used to find what you want on the site, in the old days it was an actual directory structure but now it can be lots of stuff.
Back to the URL. Look at this one: [https://www.reddit.1322.ru/r/politics/blahblahblah](https://www.reddit.1322.ru/r/politics/blahblahblah). It kind of looks like reddit at first glance once again, look between the // and the first / and you see [www.reddit.1322.ru](https://www.reddit.1322.ru/r/politics/blahblahblah) instead of [www.reddit.com](https://www.reddit.com) (.ru is Russia). When you get there, it might even look like reddit but it isn’t.
Just thought I’d add this for anyone who cares.
To answer your second question:
A complete lookup of a domain name actually runs backwards, starting at the end.
So say you’re looking up foo.random.com and you’re wanting to do a full lookup rather than trusting your immediate DNS server.
First off, you would start by consulting a [root name server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server) and asking it who controls .com.
That server will then answer and direct you to a server run by Verisign, who own the .com domain. If you were instead looking up random.org, it would send you to Afilias, who runs .org. Or if you looked up random.xxx, it would send you to Uniregistry. Or if you asked for random.app, it would send you to Google.
You’d then ask Verisign’s server “Who is the nameserver for random.com?” and it will tell you the answer. This will typically point towards a server owned by a domain registrar, like Namecheap or GoDaddy, though large sites will often operate their own.
Then you ask that server “What is the IP address for foo.random.com?” and it gives you an answer.
Lookup complete, you now know who to connect to to get the site (or other service) that you were wanting.
“commercial”. People got the phrase “dotcom” in their heads in the early days of the Internet. It doesn’t matter what you use, but some of them are supposed to have different restrictions (org is supposed to be non-profit organisations, etc.). It’s just a free-for-all mess nowadays as they just charge more for the most popular ones. Some countries top-level-domains are more strictly regulated, but not always.
Although, in every non-US country, lots of people will consider .com to be inappropriate unless you’re a large multi-national corporation (technically the US companies should be using .co.us but they never do). If you’re french, you’re gonna prioritise .fr sites for French companies over .com – it just looks tacky and amateur to just register the .com blindly.
I have had this argument at several prestigious companies who “had to” have the .com and every extension they could get their hands on (.eu and so on). Eventually they all realise that you only need one, it makes no difference what it is, and having one controlled by your own country’s legislation works out far better (e.g. all the uk companies just got booted off .eu, .com’s can be shut down by the US registry whereas .co.uk has to go through Nominet, and so on).
First of all, a clarification on some other answer: .com was *not* intended for commercial websites. .com was not intended for *any* websites. .com was created 6 years before the web even existed.
So if it was never meant to be used with the web, what was it designed for? The DNS system (mapping names to addresses) was designed for computers. In the early days of the Internet, each connected computer had a unique address. People started giving names to their computers because they were easier to remember than addresses.
At first, the names didn’t have .com at the end. In fact they didn’t have a . in them at all. In the early days of the Internet, computers had only a single word as their name, like “georgeoffice” or “jenny” or something like that.
The problem is: if you called your computer “jenny” and someone else also called their computer “jenny”, how would you distinguish between them?
Well, maybe you work at AT&T Labs and the other person works at MIT. So yours is now called “jenny.att” and the other one is “jenny.mit”. The . in between those names created a hierarchy that could more specifically identify one computer on the Internet.
But now there’s another problem. Maybe someone at the Manukau Institute of Technology (also called MIT) has named their computer “jenny”. How do you distinguish *that* MIT’s jenny from the other MIT’s “jenny”? Okay so you add one more level to your hierarchy: jenny.mit.usa vs jenny.mit.nz
And so and and so on.
This process has to stop at some point. The point at which it stops is called the “top level”. The things at the very rightmost end of a computer’s name is called its “top level domain”. com, edu, org. nz, fr, etc., are all top level domains.
The original com/edu/org/net/gov/mil/int taxonomy (commercial organizations, education organizations, non-profit organizations, networking organizations, governmental organizations, military organizations, international organizations) is a holdover from long before the web ever existed, from when the Internet was a US project. In the old days, these were the only 7 possible top level domains.
As the Internet became more internationalized, other countries adopted their own country codes. The US technically has one (.us), but it’s rarely used because so many organizations had already established a domain in the com/edu/org/net/gov/mil/int system. Since established companies were using .com, newer companies started using .com, too, to look legit.
There’s no requirement that com/etc. organizations should be in the US. These days the designation of .com is almost completely meaningless.
But it’s still a necessary organizational tool to make sure computers with a name don’t conflict with other computers with the same name somewhere else.
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