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For the past two days I've been reading up on domains and the like because I'll be setting up a website on a VPS. However, I keep getting conflicting answers from stackoverflow, youtube and various other sites (a quick google image search will show this which is extremely frustrating).

For the url:https://www.example.com

  1. Is www the subdomain or the hostname? What's the differences between the two and how can I recognize them when I'm just given a URL?
  2. Which of these are the domain / domain name? example or example.com or www.example.com? What exactly makes a domain name?
Giacomo1968
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user8380672
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  • A `hostname` is a name that can refer to `subdomain` or `domain`. A `domain` is typically a parent that a `subdomain` is but both are hostnames. `google` is meaningless. `.com` is a top level domain. `google.com` is a domain name and a hostname. `www.google.com` is a subdomain of `google.com` and a hostname as well. – Giacomo1968 Nov 21 '20 at 05:36
  • Please don't close this question. The link does not cover the definition of domain names. It covers FQDN and subdomains, however their explanation assumes prior knowledge of domain names, which I do not have. Also the wiki definition of domain names is poor and could cover both "google.com" and "www.google.com" and google images brings up different definitions. Also the above comment defines a domain in relation to subdomains, which are by definition defined by the definition of a domain so it doesn't answer anything. Eg: abc.def.mycompany.com <= what's the range for the domain & subdomain? – user8380672 Nov 21 '20 at 14:00
  • The easier way to understand this is simple: Who is the parent and child in the relationship between a great grandparent, grandparent, parent and child? There are multiple parents and children between a great grandparent, grandparent, parent and child. – Giacomo1968 Nov 21 '20 at 15:05

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Okay first of all the top level domain part of your question would be the .com also called the extension. The secondary level domain is Google. Thats probably where the confusion came in. Top level domain is the extension. Secondary level domain is the name. And a sub domain is part of that secondary level domain. Like this; www.shop.google.com The subdomain will be before the actual secondary domain and there will be a . immediately in between the two. Think of the heirarchy as in going in reverse....

E. McCleary
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