What is a Yahoo Domain Name?

What are domain names for? If you are starting a website, you need to have a web address, also known as your domain or your URL.

There are a wide variety of companies out there with a wide range of prices which sell domain names. Technically you are not buying the name, but a temporary license to use the URL online for a certain period or time (often 1 year at a time). With an annual domain registration, you can assign this address to your site.

You may even purchase multiple domain names and do what’s called a “redirect.” Using this technique, you can have visitors arrive at the same site regardless of which of your addresses they type into their internet browser.

The company that provides registration of domain names is called a “domain registrar.” The very most basic package includes a panel that you can log into and control what happens with your address. This includes essential tools like redirects and so on.

What happens is that your website host has a literal address that your files are stored at on their server, and your domain names are sent to that (usually complex looking) address. This gives an easy to remember way for your site visitors to get to your site without having to see “the man behind the curtain” so to speak.

It doesn’t seem fair that, if you come up with a unique website address, that you should have to pay someone to use it. Does it? True. It really doesn’t seem fair! However, there is a benefit to the fact that people are required to pay for domain names’ registration. This system prevents random people from using up every URL and then wasting these addresses on useless content (or worse, not using them at all).


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