The last section of a domain name?

Answer 1

The last "section" of a domain name is called the "TLD" or "ccTLD". A TLD is a "Top Level Domain", including .com, .net and .org extensions. A ccTLD is a "Country Code Top Level Domain", such as .us (United States), .uk (England), .ie (Ireland), etc.

Answer 2

Technically, the last section of a domain name is the "dot" domain, which includes the entire internet. As a matter of practice, though, you don't have to type in "answers.com."; you can omit the trailing dot.

The "COM" part is called the "top level domain". There are a couple of hundred 2-letter top level domains - the geographic domains. If a domain ends in .CA, that's a Canadian domain, if it ends in .UK, that's a domain from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and if it ends in .MS, that's a domain from the country of Montserrat (not Microsoft!) although as far as I know, no Montserrat domains have yet been issued.

Commonly, busineses and individuals get second-level domains, like the answers.com domain. There is no official limit to the number of levels in a domain name - you could create a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.give.up.com as a domain name if you owned the up.com domain. However, most internet software chokes on domain names longer than 256 characters, and some can't handle domain names longer than 64 characters.

Most websites will accept either http://something.com or http://www.something.com as the address for a website, but not all. Additionally, since www.something.com is actually a subdomain of something.com, and it's quite easy to have the domain names point to different websites. Having both names pointing to the same website is a courtesy for those of us too lazy to type the extra www.