How does the post office find your house, to deliver you mail? They can do it because you have an address. The internet works the same way. Every website has a unique address. Whereas your home's address is something like: 111 Main Street, addresses on the web are much less interesting. An internet address consists of four numbers, seperated by periods, such as: 111.222.333.444 Every website on the web has an address like this.

Actually, to be completely accurate, internet addresses point at the server, on which a website resides. There are times, and Talkspot is one of them, when multiple websites reside on the same server. Thing of this particular address as pointing at an apartment building.

Most of us find numbers hard to remember, so the internet does something very convenient. There are servers, scattered around the internet, that associate names with addresses. For instance, our talkspot website has the name (called a domain name) of www.talkspot.com , and the server it is on has the address 206.196.19.86

A domain name is the last two parts of a website address. For instance, in www.talkspot.com , the domain name is: talkspot.com.

A website address is different from an IP address (which is the four numbers we discussed previously). When someone refers to a website address, the are usually referring to the full name used to access a website via the browser, such as www.talkspot.com .

A URL (Universal Resource Locator) is the full name used to access something on the web, such as a webpage, a website, a picture, a song, etc. For instance www.talkspot.com/pictures/picture1.jpg

Also check out: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/dns1.htm
 

What you want is your own domain name. Talkspot does not sell domain names, but plenty of companies on the internet do. We use the website www.netsol.com . Network Solutions does a great job, but there are other, less expensive companies. Search with google by typing something like 'register domain name'.

A domain name will cost you $10 to $50 per year

To use your own domain name with talkspot, instead of a name like: yourname.talkspot.com, here's what you do:

Your DNS servers must be set to:

You need to email your domain name to admin@talkspot.com so that we can make some changes at our end

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