What is the part of a URL before the domain name called?

Question

So I have 2 questions:

What is this part called? en.wikipedia.org, the part before the domain name.
I wanted to make something like that for my website, like firstName.lastName.web For my personal page on my family web site.

How do I do that? I know that if I just put a folder in the root folder, its treated as a /. Like so: lastName.web/firstName.HTML. That's fine, but not what I wanted.

it's called *subdomain*. You can create one in your hosting account control panel — Zoltan Toth, Oct 07 '12 at 22:37
Possible duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8490184/htaccess-mod-rewrite-subdomain — Daedalus, Oct 07 '12 at 22:41

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 07 '12 at 22:40

11

It's called a subdomain. Creating a subdomain varies on who you have your domain name registered to. A quick google search should be able to solve this for you.

answered Oct 07 '12 at 22:40

Greg

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Creating a subdomain is usually done via that hosting's control panel. – Madara's Ghost Oct 07 '12 at 22:41

Martin Zeitler · Answer 2 · 2013-01-27T03:43:53.730

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In DNS it may be considered a sub-domain - in general this position is the hostname.

In your example this isn't even a hostname - it's just the language prepended.

Like this translations of multilanguage sites get separated ('en' is quite the default).

Usually this is all the same virtual host - just with different language resources.

Just create a sub-domain called *.yourdomain.com to enable wildcard DNS.

edited Jan 27 '13 at 03:43

answered Jan 27 '13 at 03:33

Martin Zeitler

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 12 '15 at 02:53

Nowhere did I see this spelled out in layman's terms, so here goes. I own a bunch of domain names, and here's one that is parked, right now: violetweedconsulting.com. The DOMAIN NAME is violetweedconsulting.com, that is also the 'root domain', it includes the TLD extension.

The ".com" is the TLD extension of that example domain name. Some other potential TLD extensions are ".edu", ".org", ".net", ".ca" (for canadian domains) and of course TODAY there are a lot more TLD extensions, but primarily, for most uses, those basi ones are all you'll use in the USA.(UK has co.uk, and Australia has co.au, etc.) Subdomain: The 'www' that comes just before the domainname.com is an example of a 'subdomain', or 'third level (the 'period' . is a separator character). If you are a newbie, think of the 'www' as a file folder name. If you had a website, you could be (though not always) an 'administrator' for that website on your hoster's website. Then you'd have a login to, for example, www.godaddy.com and you would thus have a login to godaddy's hosting area for your website. On that hosting site you'd have the ability to add different 'folders' like 'search' or 'blog'. The search folder might have a search-engine page (I wouldn't bother with that folder but some sites do, if they have a lot of data, for example). The 'blog' folder would be where your blog posts would go, and you can also redirect a wordpress.com (or .org) or a blogger.com to the subdomain blog.domainname.com, so that you can use the subdomain 'www.domainname.com' for whatever you want and the blog subdomain just for your journaling. There's more info available, but that's the gist of it. www is a filefolder, so is blog., etc. and each subdomain can be 'restricted' to specific users with logins, etc.

So I just saw the email for this comment today. Just wanted to comment on how time flys, in 2012 I asked this very noob-level question, and today I make and maintain websites professionally, my day job is working on a database program for a small company, and I'm working on 2 diifferent Android games in my spare time. Thanks for reminding me this page existed, lol — mitwilsch, Jan 19 '15 at 04:12

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 20 '15 at 15:40

That part is called the subdomain.

More generally speaking, here are the different parts of a URL, as per window.location. (So at least according to how Javascript calls it)

protocol://username:password@hostname:port/pathname?search#hash
-----------------------------href------------------------------
                             -----host----
-----------      origin      -------------

protocol - protocol scheme of the URL, including the final ':'
hostname - domain name
port - port number
pathname - /pathname
search - ?parameters
hash - #fragment_identifier
username - username specified before the domain name
password - password specified before the domain name
href - the entire URL
origin - protocol://hostname:port
host - hostname:port

What is the part of a URL before the domain name called?

4 Answers4