Why are Domain names important?

Every computer on the Internet needs a unique identifier-Otherwise you wouldn't be able to connect to any specific computer because you wouldn't know how to refer to it. It would be a bit like being at a party where everyone was named John and trying to get the attention of a guy on the other side of the room by calling out his first names.

To solve this problem, the clever folks who have designed and maintained the Internet over the years have come up with the domain name system. Every computer on the Internet is assigned a unique IP address, which is a set of four numbers between 0 and 255, separated by periods. No one stands a chance of remembering more than about three of these IP addresses so these same folks invented the concept of domain names, which replace the numbers with words. Software programs called domain name servers translate between domain names and IP addresses, since people prefer to use domain names when referring to computers, but computers all use IP addresses when communicating with one another.


There are a lot of computers on the Internet, probably several millions. Although there are a tremendous number of words available, especially when you take a different languages into account, there simply aren't enough unique words that are also descriptive to replace an IP address with a single word, like "Tom". The solution name could be the same while other portions could remain unique.