Your domain name

Time for your next challenge! Your domain name.

Are you an aspiring entrepreneur, do you have a brilliant idea, a hobby project? Or do you simply want your own place online? Then you’re in the right place. Everything starts with one thing: a strong domain name. A domain name is your unique name on the internet. It’s essentially your online address that you can use for your website and your email address.

Your address on the internet

Thanks to your address, others know where to find you and you can easily tell where you live. Just imagine having to explain where you live to someone from another city when there are no addresses.

A domain name does the same thing for your website. Your website has an IP address that refers to the physical location on the server in the hosting company. That's a string of numbers no one wants to remember. Your domain name makes it a lot easier. The domain name system (DNS) translates the IP address into a domain name and vice versa.

Need inspiration for a strong name?
You can find plenty of ideas on wijzijn.be, cestnous.be and claimjeidee.be.

Domain name and top-level domain

A domain name consists of two parts:

  1. the actual domain name, e.g. dnsbelgium
  2. the top-level domain (or extension), in our case:  .be

There are 2 types of top-level domains:

  1. Country code top-level domain ( ccTLD ). These refer to countries (.be for Belgium, .nl for the Netherlands, .de for Germany etc.).
  2. Generic top-level domain ( gTLD ). These are generic top-level domains (e.g. .com, .org, .net, .shop, .online, .pizza…).

The combination of a domain name and a top-level domain makes your website perfectly accessible and people can email you at your personal e-mail address.

Follow these steps to register your domain name.