Hierarchical name space

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The DNS Hierarchical Name Space is a map of how DNS servers determine what IP address to connect to given a URL

[edit] Registrars

Registrars, such as VeriSign, the operator of the .com and .net top-level domains, let any company, organization, or private individual register a TLD for any number of years. The domain name is then added to the Whois directory, and may point to a specific DNS server, which translates the domain name into an IP address.

[edit] Map

Domain names are read from right to left. Different sub-domains under a domain name are generally used to point to different servers, however, this is not always the case. For example, the wikipedia community might want a Spanish version of the site to be on a server in Mexico. So, es.wikipedia.org might point to 67.167.39.4, while en.wikipedia.org and database.en.wikipedia.org can both point to 24.73.285.3, just different pages.

                                .
         -----------------------|-----------------------------------
        /          /            |          \           \            \
       com        net          mil        org         gov          int
       |           |            |          |           |            |
    google        nsf         army     wikipedia   whitehouse      fr
                                        /  |  \
                                      en  es  sv
                                       |
                                database (imaginary)*