An FQDN (Fully qualified domain name) is a domain name that specifies where it’s located at in the hierarchy of the DNS (Domain Name System). It tells exactly where all levels of it’s domains exist relative to the root domain, which distinguishes it from the other types of domain names.

Ex.) mwolk.com, where “mwolk” is the FQDN. The trailing dot signifies that it is a FQDN, but is more frequently ignored. Character restrictions include a limit of up to 255 characters, and only allows the use of letters, numbers, and hyphens.

Let’s break down what the web address that you see actually means. For this example we will be using this sites domain name.

http://www.mwolk.com - This form is the URL (Universal Resource Locator), also known as a web address.

www.mwolk.com - The is just the domain name itself. In the registry it appears as just mwolk.com

The .com at the end of the web address is considered the top-level domain. This is the root of where all other domains originate from. The “mwolk” part of the address is considered the second-level domain, and the “www” is the host. When connecting to the host, the DNS server resolves the host to it’s corresponding IP address, and then your off to your destination.

What is a domain name?

A domain name is a simple way of addressing an IP address, or even multiple IP addresses. These are usually customized to better help describe the website, and typically consist of letters, although numbers and and dashes are allowed. An example of a domain name would be mwolk.com. Some domain names are highly sought after, and sell for high prices. For example, the website pizza.com went for a whopping $2.6 million dollars.

An example to being able to use the IP address interchangeably, we can perform the following trick.

If running Windows open up command prompt. (Start -> Run, type “cmd”)
While in an empty terminal window, try typing “ping” and then a website domain name. For this example lets try using mwolk.com.
Ex.) ping mwolk.com

Command prompt will then say something like Pinging mwolk.com [204.14.x.x] with 32 bytes of data.

Now, try typing in that IP address into a browser window’s address bar. It should take you to the same site that typing “mwolk.com” would normally take you to. Pretty neat, huh? You can try experimenting with other sites and see where their IP address takes you.

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