Iowa State University's domain name is iastate.edu . Within a domain name, there may be a number of hosts, following a naming convention of servername .domain . For example, cc.iastate.edu was a host within the iastate.edu domain name and referred to a Computation Center server. The Domain Name Service translates references to a name, such as webct1.cc.iastate.edu , into an IP address, such as 129.186.1.35 . The fully qualified name of a specific server or computer on the Internet.
Every networked computer has a hostname, by which it is known on the network.
For example, webct1.cc.iastate.edu is the name of the server hosting WebCT software at Iowa State. A specific computer or device name is the first part of the hostname and a domain name is the latter part of the hostname. In this example, webct1 is a computer name and cc.iastate.edu is a domain name. Interactions on the campus network must use this protocol to communicate with the Internet. The numeric address denoting the actual address used by Internet processes to address computers and servers on the Internet.