What Is a Valid Domain Name?
Domain names are the (relatively) easy to remember addresses used to locate web pages on the Internet. Special computers, called DNS Servers, are used to convert the domain names into the IP addresses that can be used to identify the web page's true location on the Internet.
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Top Level Domains
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All domain names will have a "top-level domain." These are ".com," ".net" and ".edu." Other top-level domains include country codes like ".ca" for Canada and ".tw" for Taiwan. Each top-level domain may have stricter format rules than the common ".com" and ".net" domains.
Length
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Domain names have a maximum length of 63 characters (not including the top-level domain). However, some applications may not support the full 63 characters, so domain names should generally be less than 26 characters. Some top-level domains also bar domain names shorter than 3 characters.
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Valid Characters
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Domain names can only contain English letters, numbers and the hyphen character (-). They may never begin nor end with a hyphen. Some top-level domains specify that a domain name may never combine two hyphens in a row.
Sub-Domains
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A given domain name may have any number of sub-domains, the most common being "www." Rather than identifying a specific computer on the Internet, sub-domains are used to identify different services or sections of the same server.
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