A. For some reason the internet community and the geeks have made this sound entirely too complicated.

In easy to understand terms, domain registration is like those vanity phone numbers, like "1-800-contacts".

Your telephone has letters assigned to each number, so you can figure out which numbers to press to dial the phone number.

Domain names, are similar, with a few slight differences.

Primarily, every web server, is assigned an IP address, i.e. 127.0.0.1 and that IP address is made public (similar to a phone number) so all the other servers can see it.

Next we have websites, that need some where to live, so we put them on the server with the public IP address. The problem is, that an IP address isn't very easy to remember, because we're human, and we already have enough numbers rattling around in our heads.

So, we needed an easy way to remember these sites, that's where the domain registration comes in. I register the domain www.corbinwebworks.com, and tell the "operator" to point everyone that enters www.corbinwebworks.com, to my IP address, so the website can be viewed without remembering an IP address.

In this example the "operator" is a DNS server, which keeps track of all the IP addresses, and all the domain names, and makes sure the right website goes to the right IP address.