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
> 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).
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