Domains
Anatomy of a domain
Every domain is made of a handful of distinct parts, each controlled by a different party. Understanding them makes it much easier to read WHOIS data, debug DNS issues, and understand what Domain Flock is actually checking.
The parts of a domain name
Take blog.example.co.uk apart and you get three kinds of labels, each separated by a dot:
| Part | What it is |
|---|---|
| Subdomain | An optional prefix (blog, www, mail) that points to a specific host or service under the main domain. You control these entirely through your own DNS records: no registration required. |
| Second-level domain | The name you actually registered: example in this case. This is the part you pay a registrar for and renew each year. |
| Top-level domain | The suffix (.com, .co.uk, .io) that sits at the top of the hierarchy. Some TLDs, like .co.uk, are actually two labels: a country-code TLD with its own second-level structure underneath. |
Put the second-level domain and TLD together, example.co.uk, without any subdomain, and you get the root domain. This is the domain Domain Flock tracks: its registration expiry, its WHOIS record, and (depending on how you've configured it) the certificates and headers served at the root or at www.
Types of TLD
- Generic TLDs (gTLDs):
.com,.org,.net, and newer additions like.appor.dev. Open for registration by anyone, anywhere. - Country-code TLDs (ccTLDs):
.uk,.de,.jp. Assigned to a specific country or territory, sometimes with local presence requirements or their own registration rules. - Sponsored TLDs:
.gov,.edu,.bank. Restricted to a specific category of registrant and usually vetted before registration.
Registry vs. registrar
These two terms get used interchangeably but mean different things:
- The registry is the organisation that operates a TLD and maintains its master database: Verisign runs
.com, Nominet runs.uk. There's exactly one registry per TLD. - A registrar is the company you actually buy the domain from: Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, and hundreds of others. Registrars are accredited by registries to sell and manage domains on their behalf, and you can usually move a domain between registrars without changing its registration.
When Domain Flock shows a domain's registrar, that's the company managing your registration, not the underlying registry.
Nameservers and DNS
Nameservers are the servers responsible for answering DNS queries for your domain: they're what turn example.com into an IP address, tell mail servers where to deliver email, and hold verification records for third-party services. Your registrar sets which nameservers are authoritative for your domain (often the registrar's own, or a separate DNS provider's), and those nameservers hold the actual records.
This is a different layer entirely from registration: a domain can be registered with one company and have its DNS hosted somewhere else. Both matter for uptime: if your registration lapses, the domain disappears; if your nameservers go down or are misconfigured, the domain resolves to nothing even though registration is fine.
WHOIS and registration data
The registry (and often the registrar) publishes a WHOIS record for every registered domain: who registered it, when, when it expires, and which nameservers it uses. This is the data source behind Domain Flock's expiry tracking: see WHOIS information for how that works and what happens when a registrant uses privacy protection.
A domain's registration and its SSL certificate are managed completely independently: one can be perfectly valid while the other has lapsed. See SSL & expiry checks for how Domain Flock tracks both.