When the Internet was first brought to life there was not a lot of order to it. Things were done quite haphazardly and no one could have foreseen the huge scope of the Internet in the future. The growth and development of the Internet has been amazing to watch over the years.

In the history of domains, they were broken up into six different gTLD‘s (generic top level domains). These were: .com, .mil, .edu, .gov, .net, .org. These broke the domains up into categories to make navigating and registering domains easier and more orderly.

.org was originally developed for non-profit organizations
.net was for networks
.mil is for military
.edu is for educators and educational institution sites
.com was meant for commercial use
.gov is for government agencies

These suffixes to domain names help to organize. Since the time that these were put in place in 1985 there have been others added to the list. There are now suffixes such as .info, .tv and more.

What it comes down to is that the domains were created so that we weren’t trying to remember a string of numbers for every website. IP addresses are what these numbers are and not easily remembered, catchy or personal. The domain name disguises the IP address and makes it something more appealing and recognizable.

There are also cTLD’s (country code top level domains). This you will see as .uk or .us so that people can recognize what country the website is actually from. This helps when you go to order a product on the Internet and you start to check out only to see that they are shipping the item from Australia. It’s good to know what country you are doing business with.

If you are looking to obtain a domain name there are some great companies with reasonable pricing plans. We recommend GoDaddy, or getting domain registration for free when you purchase a hosting plan from iPowerWeb.