What would happen if there was only one post office in the world, and everybody had to acquire a post office box number from that post office? This would mean that there would be big numbers which are hard to remember. To make it easier, we could create a different way of naming, whereby we ask the post office staff to associate your name with your specific box number. This means that people do not need to remember the long and complex number, but only need to know my name to send me a letter. The post office staff would need to know both my name and my assigned number, and when they receive a letter addressed to my name, they would know which box number to put it.
The internet operates like one big Post Office, where everybody is given their unique address to identify them. Every resource in the internet is identified by a 12 digit number called the IP address. Since it is hard to remember a twelve digit string, domain names are used to identify the resources, and these domain names are linked to specific IP addresses. Thus, if you have a website, instead of being identified as 41.182.168.102, it is identified as www.truehost.cloud. This name is what is called a domain name. When someone tries to access the domain name from a web browser, the web browser first contacts a domain name server, which ‘resolves’ the name for it, by checking the list of names and numbers and giving the browser the right number associated with that domain, and the browser proceeds to go that IP address since it is unique.
For the Kenyan domain, a domain name would be something like www.mydomain.co.ke, or www.mydomain.ke. Here, ‘my domain’ is your preferred brand name, business name, blog name. This means that if you run a business by the name victory cakes, you can opt to choose the domain name www.victorycakes.com, or if your name is Tony and you are running a blog, you can choose the domain name www.tonysblog.co.ke.
There are two levels of Kenyan domain names that one can choose to acquire; this is second or third level domains. Second level domains are the ones that end just with a .ke, such as www.mydomain.ke, while third level domain are the ones with one more prefix before the .ke part, such as www.mydomain.or.ke. The third level domain options that are available for Kenyan domains include .co.ke, .or.ke, .ac.ke, ne.me, me.ke, and .sc.ke. A full list of all the Kenyan domain names and their use can be found here.
