domain names with white.wiget.com

if a domain name has a dot"." before the name, is it all 1 name or can.....

[teeceo]

There be more then 1 name for it. What I mean is, lets say wiget.com was found as white.wiget.com, black.wiget.com, and green.wiget.com. Are all these still the same website and how do you do that "." thing before the domain name?

teeceo.

[hayluke]

It's all in the DNS records. Basically as I understand it you can have anything before the dot (although obviously this is usually www) and this can then be pointed anywhere. Another example of this would be mail.domain or smtp.domain that can be set to point to mail servers..

[glengara]

If you mean www.white.widget.com, it's a subdomain of widget.com.

[teeceo]

"Another example of this would be mail.domain or smtp.domain that can be set to point to mail servers.."

But, does that mean that wiget.com is the domain name and white.wiget.com and any other words that are before wiget that have a . in front of them(like white. or red.wiget)are part of wiget.com or are they there own domain?

teeceo.

[fathom]

Which is identifical to a simple sub-directory but acts like a separation between sub-sites.

[teeceo]

And subdomains are part of the main domain right? or is there something different in the ownership?

teeceo.

[Shakil]

subdomains are PART of the domain name.

ownership rights etc are with the domain, unless specific agreement has been reached.

eg: keyword.uk.com - here UK.com is the domain name, but the owner has decided to start selling subdomains to the general public.

Shak

[bcc1234]

Well, actually the dns was designed with the ability to delegate zones to authoritative servers. That's what makes it almost scale-free.

I'll skip the details to simplify the whole thing, but the idea is that "your" dns server is authoritative of your zone, which is mydomain.com. It was delegated to your name server by the name server authoritative of the com. zone, which in turn was delegated by the root server (there are a few of those) - authoritative of the . zone.

So you have your name server and a zone mydomain.com.
In that zone, you can create different types of records.
One of the types in the IN class is A-record that specifies the IP address of a host.

The host can be anything in that zone.
For example, www or white or black; thus, www.mydomain.com., white.mydomain.com. and black.mydomain.com.

Since the commercialization of the web, most people started assigning A-records to the zone itself - mydomain.com. which is not a correct thing to do, but everybody does it (including me) so let's just leave it be.

Now, www.black.mydomain.com. can be realized in two ways:
1) As an A-record www.black in mydomain.com. zone
or
2) As an A-record www in black.mydomain.com. zone, which must be delegated to another name server by mydomain.com.

That's about it.

Oh yeah, "sub-domain" is just a word that got stuck around.
Just like using a word "bandwidth" in "That hosting company allows 100GB of bandwidth per month."

So I guess, one can call www.black.mydomain.com. - a sub-domain of mydomain.com.

Just my $0.02.