About domain name registration

Before you create a domain, you must register the domain with ICANN or an ICANN-Accredited Registrar. ICANN is an international organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. An ICANN-accredited registrar typically provides domain registration services for one or more top level domains, for example, Go Daddy is an ICANN-accredited registrar for the .biz, .com, .net, .org, .info, and other top level domains.

To register a domain, you need to inform your domain name registrar about the domain name and the name servers responsible for handling queries related to that domain and all names that belong to that domain. A name server is a host that translates the text name of a domain into the numeric IP address of the domain.

Typically, more than one name server is assigned to the domain to provide fault tolerance and load-balancing. When you assign multiple name servers to a domain, you need to configure one of the servers as the master name server and the rest as slave name servers. The queries for the domain are handled by the master and all of the slaves in a round-robin fashion. You specify the name servers for a domain when you create the domain.