A domain name is the human-readable address that stands in for a server’s numeric address: the record that points to a website, not the website itself. A booking or sales tool added later needs no second name: as separate software, it takes its own label under the existing one. KGM SsangYong’s online vehicle store runs apart from the corporate site as its own system, under the same brand name on the onlinestore label.
What a domain name is and what it does
Every server reachable on the internet answers at a numeric address. A domain name is the readable label registered in place of that number, and the whole arrangement exists because the number is unusable by people: it is hard to remember, and it can change over the life of a system.
Pointing is the whole of a name’s work, since it carries no content and runs no software of its own. That pointing runs through a lookup, and the lookup happens before any page is requested: a browser meeting an address whose number it does not hold asks a domain name server, whose job is to say which numeric address belongs to each registered name. The connection opens on the strength of that answer.
A registrar is the company that takes a registration and keeps the technical and administrative detail tying a name to its holder. Two other parties stand with it. A registry keeps the ledger of names and knows which of them are taken. You are the third, the registrant, the party a name is registered to.
A name left unrenewed can be released and registered by whoever asks for it next, because a domain name is not bought. What you pay for is the right to use a name for a period, recorded in your favour, and that right is renewed before the period runs out. Renewal takes priority over anyone else’s application, and still no ownership arrives: the name is held rather than owned.
What stops with a lapsed name is more than a website. Anything the record carries stops with it, and an email service is one of the things it carries.
KGM SsangYong’s corporate site is published at an address that carries the brand’s name. Whose name the registration itself sits in is a separate question, and the answer belongs to the article on what you actually receive at a software handover.
Two or more destinations can sit under one registered name, and any of them can be edited later. Both facts cut against the common reading of a domain name, in which the name somehow finds a website: what a name reaches is whatever its holder has pointed it at.
Domain name, hosting and the website itself are separate items
One invoice is not one item. A hosting provider can also be a registrar, and in that case the domain name and the server space appear on one invoice from one company, which is when the three items are easiest to confuse; the bundle is a commercial arrangement rather than a technical dependency.
Taken one at a time, hosting is a place: the server space where a site’s files and its application sit and answer incoming requests. The domain name alongside it is a registration, held with a registrar and alive for as long as it is renewed. Code, a database and the files users have uploaded make up the third item, the software.
What goes missing differs from one item to the next, and so does the check that proves an item arrived, which is why a handover list gives each of them a row. The code repository takes one, a dump of the database another, and the files users uploaded and the environment settings take theirs; further down, the hosting account and the domain registration share a row of their own. Paperwork is where the separation becomes visible, and software changing hands is when that paperwork gets written.
Our frequently asked questions page answers the hidden-costs question in the same terms. Hosting and the domain name are billed to you by the provider rather than by us, and we stay out of it; the proposal names them as lines of their own instead of folding them into a total. On a price list that is all the split looks like.
Which of the three stopped? On the day a site does not open that is the useful question, and one phone call settles it where the holder of each item is written down. There are three candidates: the name failing to resolve, the server not answering, the application returning an error; where nothing is written down, all three parties take turns pointing at one another.
Each item also moves without the others. The software can be rebuilt while the address in the visitor’s address bar stays exactly as it was. Hosting can be carried to another provider while the registration stays untouched. The registration can move between registrars while the site keeps serving from the same server space.
How to read an address: extension, name and subdomain
Start with the question people actually ask: does an address with www reach the same place as the address without it? Nothing in the address itself answers that. One reading rule shows where the answer comes from.
Four live addresses make the rule visible: www.ssangyong.com.tr, onlinestore.ssangyong.com.tr, randevu.pilatesco.com and calculator.resterm.com. In each of them only the brand’s name and its extension were registered; every label further left is a door the holder of the name opened. Reading from the right, the extension comes first and the name the brand registered sits immediately to its left. An extension can be a single label such as .com or several labels such as .com.tr.
A subdomain is a domain that forms part of another one, and it can carry content or a system of its own. Organisations open them to give a department, a function or a service a name of its own. Opening one costs no second registration and no second invoice, because whoever controls the name does it. Every label to the left of a registration is one.
www is one of those labels, a convention rather than a required part of a name, and where it leads is up to whoever holds the name. Where nobody has written a rule for it, the forms with and without www can lead to different places. A rule on the server does two jobs at once: whichever form a visitor types lands in the same place, and the same pages do not circulate as a second copy at a second address. Our own site has one; its canonical address is the bare domain name, and every non-canonical host name, www included, is sent there.
At KGM SsangYong the www label carries the corporate site itself. On our own site the same label carries nothing but a redirect. A label, in other words, says nothing about what lives behind it, and parsing an address is not how anyone finds out. Going to it is.
Several systems under the same name: the addresses side by side
More than one piece of software can live under a single brand name. Each one takes a left-hand label of its own while the extension and the brand’s name stay where they are, so the addresses read as variations of one name and stand in front of separate systems.
Four of them, side by side:
| Address | Left-hand label and its job | What runs behind it | Project record |
|---|---|---|---|
| www.ssangyong.com.tr | www: the corporate site | The brand’s corporate site; it was already running when it reached us | KGM SsangYong corporate site |
| onlinestore.ssangyong.com.tr | onlinestore: the sales channel | The brand’s online vehicle store, a separate system from the corporate site | KGM SsangYong online store |
| randevu.pilatesco.com | randevu: the booking software | A pilates studio’s booking and membership software | Pilatesco booking software |
| calculator.resterm.com | calculator: the sizing tool | An electric heater manufacturer’s selection and quoting software | Resterm heater selection software |
Every row ends in a project record, and that final column turns the table into something you can check rather than an illustration: behind each address there is a record describing a different piece of software. Working leftwards from it, the third column names what kind of software answers and the second names the job of the label. The first column is the one that repeats itself, since inside a brand the extension and the brand’s name never move.
Two pages of one site is the natural guess about the first two rows, and the project records say otherwise: the sales channel is kept as a system of its own, apart from the corporate site, so there are two records rather than one. Both rows belong to KGM SsangYong. One is published at the address holding the brand’s name, the other under the onlinestore label.
Each of the last two rows is software on a subdomain of a name its owner already had, and neither row claims more than its address. Resterm’s heater selection and quoting software answers at the calculator label; Pilatesco’s booking and membership software answers at the randevu label.
A business adding a system does not go hunting for a second brand name. The name its customers already know stays where it is, and the new system opens behind a label of its own under that name. One name with many systems is what those four addresses show.
When a system gets its own subdomain and when it is a page of the same site
There is one test, and technology has no part in it. A section of the software that already exists takes a path, and a separate piece of software takes a name of its own; the only thing to settle about anything being added is which of the two it is.
A path is resolved inside whichever application answers, which is to say the software itself decides which page to render. A different left-hand label can instead be translated to a different numeric address at lookup time, sending the request elsewhere before any application sees it. So one of the two choices is made before the software and the other inside it, and that is what the test is really asking about.
No separate name was opened for the blog or for the service pages on our own site. They are two paths in one application, neither of them a separate system, and a name for either would have sent a reader somewhere else for something that lives here.
KGM SsangYong shows the other side. The sales channel is its own system alongside the corporate site, and it carries a label of its own rather than sitting under the marketing pages as a path. The fact is short: separate system, separate address.
Enquiry forms usually come out on the path side. A form is part of the page a visitor is already reading, not software of its own, so a corporate site that keeps its marketing pages and its enquiry form in one application gives it no separate address and nobody is sent elsewhere to leave a request.
Applying the test to your own plan takes a pen. Put each item on the list into one of two columns, separate software or section of the same site, and the shape of the address follows from the column. One name can carry both columns at once, which is what the first two rows of the table above are. The question is never which shape reads better; it is whether the piece is software in its own right.
The address stays put; the system behind it can change
Businesses about to change hosting provider, maintenance team or framework usually ask whether the address survives it. It does, and the definition carries the reason: the name is a pointer, and what a pointer holds can be edited. Behind it sits a record naming the machine that replies, and replacing that machine leaves the typed address untouched. So a change of server, host, team or software moves the destination and nothing else.
Editing one record touches none of what is already in circulation under the name: printed material, search results, links from other sites, every email address built on it. Renaming at the same time as a move is the technically possible alternative, and its cost lands on every one of them.
Taking a live system over without shutting it down means the upkeep changes hands while the site stays open, and KGM SsangYong’s corporate site is a case of it. Another team wrote that site. The site was live when we took it over, visitors were never shut out while the handover ran, and today it is live at an address that includes the brand’s name.
The mirror image of this article exists as well. In the multi-tenant system where Vipkurum’s institutions each arrive on a domain name of their own, one piece of software answers under many names. There, one system has many names. Here, one name has many systems.
Permanence is a condition rather than a property: it belongs to the registration, not to the name, and the record holds still only for as long as somebody renews it. Let a registration lapse and the name can be released while the system behind it goes on working; what stopped is then the address rather than any machine.
Which domain decisions are made before a site is built
Three decisions about a name cost less before the work starts than after it. The first is whose name the registration goes into. Settled at the start it costs a sentence; discovered on handover day it costs a negotiation with whoever holds the account. The article on what a handover actually delivers counts the domain registration as a line of its own and describes what gets checked on the day.
Leave the address plan until later and the address question comes back, this time over a system that is already serving visitors. What it asks is which labels and which paths get opened, and the answer comes from the list of systems that will sit next to the site: a sales channel, booking software, a calculator. That list belongs in the page-plan conversation, and the shape of the addresses is the second decision.
A guide to testing whether a contract clause really closes a decision names the lines a domain name needs in a contract, and the third decision is which of them your draft already has. There is more than one line: who the registration belongs to, who holds the panel login, and what event the transfer is tied to, each written separately. No legal advice is on offer here; knowing what the lines are called is what shortens the conversation.
If a site is already live and a second system is coming next to it, how many systems you have is worked out during the reading stage of a takeover, and the address plan is then written against that result rather than against a guess.
An address plan settled early leaves a second system with nothing to open but a label. Edit rights follow the registration, so a name registered in your own name keeps them with you. A contract that records where the access sits keeps the question of who performs an edit out of dispute. The three decisions prop each other up rather than running in sequence.
If a sales, booking or calculator tool is coming next to your site, or a live site has to move across from another team, describe it in the project step of the quote form. Mention the domain name and the hosting you already hold, and those items stay off the proposal.
