Hostnames

IP addresses are not very easy to remember. If you had the choice between remembering your friends by their names or by their telephone numbers, which one would you choose? Telephone numbers are divided into sections that help identify where you are, but names give you a description. Names are much more friendly and they are easier to remember. Hostnames have the same purpose as real names. They are arranged with a host and a domain. If my host computer was named red and the domain was paintcolors.com then the hostname would be red.paintcolors.com. With a host name you can remember the site much better than if you had to remember the IP address. Like names and telephones, there is a way to look up the IP address of a computer if you have the hostname. Later in this chapter we will talk about Domain Name Servers (DNS) the phone books of the Internet. A problem with hostnames is that you cannot really share the same name as some other computer since the whole world can use the same name to talk to you.