A domain name is the first step

[fatimahislam]

Towards starting your online business. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s a simple case of registering your company name with “.com.au” attached to the end. There are many considerations when purchasing and registering a domain name, some which you may be aware of and others that don’t present themselves as obviously.


Before we go into the processes and considerations of purchasing domain names, let’s look at a brief history so there is an understanding of how the domain name system was developed. Reaching a machine by domain name started much like dialing a telephone. You may have noticed the word machine in the previous sentence. This is because in the early days of the internet (the late 60’s and early 70’s), two machines being linked by cable were used to transfer files to each other. These connections were the commencement of the early internet, spurring on engineers and computer programmers to make better, faster and more raster to vector conversion service reliable connections to even more machines. In 1969 ARPANET, a network of computers set up by US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and Bolt Beranek and Newman (the company who won the government contract to work on the project), were used to send email between each other, proving to be the most popular application within the ARPANET network.

By the middle of 1969 ARPANET had 62 computers attached to its network, the very beginnings of our online, digital world. In the early 1980’s a system was implemented to allow users to connect to machines by human-readable names, instead of the physical address which is represented by numbers (an IP address). Shortly after, American Paul Mockapetris proposed a Domain Name System (DNS) architecture that remains essentially the same today. This allowed people to type in a name like George or Washington to connect to a machine instead of using an IP address. This concept remains pretty much the same today with the addition of extensions like .au or .uk. In Australia, the .au Domain Administration Ltd (auDA) is responsible for the regulation and policy authority of the .au domain name system. This is the body that accredits and licenses registrars; companies that wish to sell domain names, receive consumer complaints and initiate consumer safeguards regarding Australian domain names.