All right, we'll start the whole discussion about a cloud and virtual business. By talking about domain names, you know what a domain name is, you've sent people email at domain names like google.com, or gmail.com. you've typed domain names into web browsers, bing.com yahoo.com, Whitehouse calm or whitehouse.gov, don't type whitehouse.com. Those are all internet domain names. The domain name idea is make it easier for human beings give us things that we can spell out using the common characters, and the numbers and dash a hyphen i think is the only other legitimate character. In order to get the actual machine addresses of services and machines that are on the internet.

I would never remember the numbers of all of the various services that I hit on the net in the course of the day, but I'm pretty good at remembering them. And my browser is pretty good at remembering the names. I want to explain a bit about how domain names work sort of basics of it, because it has an effect on what you get, why you get it, and why it's important. When you're on your trusty computer on the net, and you got to browse a website, first thing that happens, let's say you're going to google.com Now, let's say going to PDQ calm. First thing that happens is your machine actually goes and looks up PDQ comm and a machine that it already knows about a DNS domain, domain name service server, it's sitting out there, fairly typical for that to be operated by your internet service provider.

So you're sending requests and who the heck is PDQ calm and DNS sends an answer back and says PDQ calm is actually out at This address just making this up, it's not a real address. So now your machine knows the internet address for the thing that you asked for, and sort of human being terms and it says, great. I'm going to go out and talk to the machine, or whatever responds to me at 3254 6578. You think you're going to PDQ calm you think your browser is talking to PDQ calm. Your browser is actually talking to that IP address. DNS has resolved, looked up and resolve for it.

And that machine sitting there it says my job when someone asked for a web page is to send back the PDQ web page. Here it comes. Bring all the pieces into your browser. Simple, right? There's a lot more to it than just your website. It is your website.

It's your email addresses. It's services that you might use over the long haul whether it File Transfer, transfer FTP, or security certification SSL, Secure Sockets Layer certificate, were actually quite a broad number of things over time, I would equate owning and controlling your domain name to owning and controlling your company name and your postal address. In the real world, you really couldn't be in business, if someone couldn't send you an envelope, right? There are hundreds, if not thousands of digital envelopes that will come to you, or do work for you based on what you can do with a domain name. The next section I'm going to talk about hosting, I'd encourage you not to register your domain name until you've watched the section on hosting. They're closely related.

And my experience for better or worse, has led me to conclude some things on that maybe a little bit was sort of looking for not obvious but useful in the long run. Just to go down a level on how you get a domain name for those of you who haven't done it, there are many, many companies in the business of registering domains. They're called domain registrar's. Oddly enough, their their job, their business, if you will, back in this turf is to put entries in here and to say that this person or this business owns this particular name, someone at some point said, Wow, pdq.com is available. And they paid a fee to a domain registrar to put the entry in the worldwide DNS sang. We own that we control that.

I don't necessarily advise just grabbing a domain, and then worrying about domain hosting, later web hosting, email hosting and the other kinds of services that get attached to the domain. I think you should think about those two things in conjunction with each other. And if you can avoid just pulling the trigger registering a domain. domain registration is probably a very good business for some big companies. But it can be irksome if the services you need to run with your domain in a year aren't available where you registered the domain. And then you're into a more complex kind of technical workload technical trap of moving the domain, or leaving it there, but getting the services somewhere else and trying to tell registrar, a domain name here, that you're actually running things over there.

So as I said, think of those two things in conjunction with one another. So domain name service, back to domain name service in a nutshell, names that are easy for human beings to remember. And a big phone directory out on the net, whose job it is to look those up and turn them into machine and service addresses that other machines can talk to. You want to own and control your own domain name. So make sure that's early on in your Plans. next section we'll talk about hosting.

Don't miss that.