Overview

To do business on the Web, you'll need at least one domain name—the yada-yada-dot-com that has become so familiar in commercials and print advertising. Your domain name may be the name you already use for a business, with a dot-com added, or a new name that you think will do a good job of getting people to your website. If you follow the lead of many businesses, you'll use multiple domain names to help the widest possible number of potential customers find your site among the many thousands out there.
Choosing a name, or more than one, for your website is no trivial matter—your decisions can make or break your business. This explains why some domain names have been auctioned off for huge amounts of money. The current record-holder is business.com, which went for an astounding $7.5 million. The winning bidder apparently believes the name has enough customer-drawing power to make it worthwhile. Fortunately for small e-commerce start-ups with limited budgets, most businesses make up their domain names or use names that they are already using as trademarks, and don't pay anyone a penny for the privilege.
Domain Name Anatomy
Domain names consist of two main parts: the top-level domain name, or TLD, and the second-level domain name, or SLD. The SLD comes first. For example, in nolo.com, nolo is the SLD.
The TLD comes at the end of the domain name, after the ubiquitous dot. TLDs are organized, for U.S. participants, into five categories:
•.com, for commercial groups
•.edu, for educational institutions
•.gov, for governmental entities
•.org, for nonprofit organizations, and
•.net, for interactive discussion groups.
It's the SLD that makes your domain name unique. Almost all U.S. businesses choose to operate under the .com domain. There are plans to introduce a number of new TLDs, such as .inc and .stor, but it hasn't happened yet. And even when it does, most businesses are still going to want to be "dotcoms." Other countries have their own TLDs—for example, .fr for France, .gr for Greece, .to for Tonga.