What is a web address?
On top of this page you can see a white space with a sequence of letters starting with “https://www.webspace.com.mt“. That is the web address of the page you are reading now or, using the formal name, its Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URL is made of different parts: it is easy to look at it as a street address where the street name is the domain name (webspace.com.mt in this case) and the civic number is what comes afterwards and it is related to a page or part of it within the same website.
Let’s take an easy example.
https://www.webspace.com.mt/what-type-of-web-hosting-do-i-need/
- Regarding the first part, a URL always starts with a protocol prefix, like “http://” or “https://”. Lot of browers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer use the so-called Hyper Text Transfer Protocol to load web pages. The “s” in “https” means that the website is encrypted by a security code which prevents data stealing by hackers. To learn more about it, please visit our page address https://www.webspace.com.mt/ssl-certificates/
- After the protocol, the second part of the web address consists of the domain name, a string that identifies a unique authority within the internet. Webspace.com.mt is therefore representing an organization that chose this simple name to be easily recognized and memorized by internet users. More technically, the domain name is an alphabetical (and more recognizable) abstraction of a numerical label, the Internet Protocol address (IP address), which has been assigned to the webhost’s server by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). When your computer server communicate with webspace.com.mt’s one, they use these IP addresses made up of numbers and the Domain Name System (DNS), the authority which controls the domain names, translates the IP address into the related URL and the requested webpage appears on your screen through the browser you are using.
- The last part of the web address shows the position where a particular webpage is located on the server. Depending at which level of this path, webpages can be at the directory, folder or subfolders level following this order:
www.domainname/directory/folder/subfolder1/subfolder2 etc. etc.
