: Domain name explanations I recently thought to myself why certain websites have very unique domain names. Is it possible for a website to have for example www.aboutus.example.com instead of www.example.com/aboutus

@Sims2060225

Generally, when you see names instead of IP Addresses, they are called, in general "domain names". Thus:


example.com is a domain name
sub.example.com is also a domain name
srv.sub.example.com is also a domain name


The .com part is called a TLD (Top Level Domain). The example part is called 2LD (Second Level Domain) and so on. The higher level domains are generally called "subdomains" of the lower level ones. Thus, referring to the examples above:


sub is a subdomain of example.com
srv is a subdomain of sub.example.com


Now, in a URI, the parts after the slash after the domain name, is handled by the server who is using the domain name. For example, if we have the URI sub.example.com/about, the browser contacts the server called sub.example.com using the HTTP protocol, informing the server that the browser wants to view an object located in /about (note the leading slash).

Is it possible to change the URI from sub.example.com/about to, let's say about.sub.example.com? Yes, but one needs a different IP address to ensure that what's returned by the latter is different from what's returned by sub.example.com. The reason is that HTTP version 1.0 don't provide the full URI in its request, only HTTP version 1.1 actually provide the full URI. Thus, a browser not supporting HTTP version 1.1 will cause the server to be confused and likely receives the wrong page.

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@BetL925

You need to understand what subdomains are.

When you purchase a domain, you purchase something like example.com.

If you see something like example.com or aboutus.example.com, aboutus is just a subdomain of example.com. When you see something like aboutus.example.com, www is a subdomain of aboutus.example.com. When you insert a dot (.), you create a subdomain.

When you purchase a domain like example.com, you can create several subdomains and sub-subdomains (as you want). For your information, each subdomain represents a different website.

Stack Exchange doesn't have different domain names, the company has the stackexhange.com domain name and several subdomains of it.

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