Internet addresses

[Rhp1]

What is the difference between .com .net co.uk .org at the end of web addresses.

[vehelpfulguy]

When the internet started it was used by a just few different organizations - mainly universities and government agencies, but also some companies.

To show what type of web site it was the last few letters denoted this, so COM was a company, GOV was goverment agencies, EDU was educational, and ORG was an organization.

As the internet grew lots more of these were added (called Top Level Domains), including ones for individual countries, like say UK for United Kingdom and CA for Canada and so on.

So generally COM is a worldwide company (Microsoft say) -although not always.

CO.UK is a UK Company, and ORG.UK is a UK organization.

NET is a company involved in the Internet Network (Virgin.NET for example)

While these can be taken as a guide I think anyone can create a web site with any address, so I could create one called www.bigcompany.com even though I am running the company from my bedroom.

You can see a list of all the top level domains here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_ top-level_domains

[ChuckFickens]

originally it was meant to be

.com international site
.net used by large computer networks such as internet service providers
.co.uk a UK based site

In pratice as there are no real rules as to who can register these top level domains you can't take the above as being true

.net and .com a generic top level domains, there is a list of the others and what they refer to at the livk below, some of them are restricted (such as .mil which is for US militry) and some aren't (.com .net .info)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level _domain

On top of this pretty much every country in the world has there own top level domain like .co.uk (well just .uk strictly speaking) there is a (large) list of these Country code top-level domain (CCtld) here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CcTLD

[Rhp1]

thanks to you both for the info .