A domain or domain name, is an identifier that represents a unique subset of the Domain Name System (DNS). Having your own domain name is a prerequisite for accessing many of the features offered by the Internet, such as your website and email.
A domain name consists of characters separated by a dot. The character to the right of the dot represents the Top Level Domain (TLD), the highest level of the DNS hierarchical structure. There are many TLDs in the world today. Each country is entitled to its own ISO country code TLD, and a number of generic TLDs have been introduced, the most well-known being COM, NET and ORG. Finnish Top Level Domain is .Fi. The European Unio´s TLD is .EU and the Swedish TLD is .SE.
A good example of a common domain name is ZONE.FI. If you read the domain name from right to left, the first character is the Top Level Domain FI, which stands for Finland, and the second character is the word ZONE. The registrant of this domain is Zone Media OY and it contains the company trademark Zone. Such a two-character domain name is also known as a second level subdomain.
Often we also come across domain names lower down in the DNS hierarchy, such as www.zone.fi. In addition to the top-level domain FI and the second-level subdomain zone, this domain also contains the third-level subdomain www.
On the Internet, it has become customary for the third level subdomain containing the WWW character and the second level subdomain to also stand for the server hosting the website associated with the domain. To access the Zone Media website, all you need to do is type zone.fi or www.zone.fi into the address bar of your browser.
IDN domains
In Finland, it is also possible to order an IDN domain name (ä, å, ö, ü and the Cyrillic alphabet used in the Finnish language), where the characters are non-ASCII characters. The same applies to the Swedish å, Romanian ș, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. At the same time, a couple of important aspects must be taken into account, which you can read about HERE.
General conditions when ordering domain name
Each domain name must be unique. In general, a name must meet the following conditions:
- the name can be a minimum of 2 characters long.
- The minimum length of an INFO domain is 3 characters.
- the name may contain letters from ‘a-z’ , numbers from ‘0-9’ and a hyphen ‘-‘.
- the name can be up to 63 characters long
- the name must not start with a hyphen
- some domain names may not contain a hyphen as the third and fourth character.
The domain names of computers or servers connected to the Internet are characterised by the fact that their numeric IP addresses are associated with them in the DNS system. For example, the domain named www.zone.fi is associated with the IP address 185.31.241.16. It is possible to go even deeper in the DNS hierarchy. For example, it is possible to create a domain called of five.four.three.two.one.zone.fi and this would be a perfectly correct domain.