When business people create a business plan for a new business, they will generally identify whether the business will operate at an online web address or if it will be establish in a land-based location with a street address. Most business people want to own every aspect of their business and by registering a domain address for the business they feel that they own a piece of the internet.

Some business owners prefer to start out land-based but move to the internet because more people will have access to the products that they offer for sale. The domain registration is a critical point in making sure all customers can find the business site once it joins other retailers who are located on the internet.

Some business names are used for the domain registration process and other names are used by the business owner to create a unique presence on the web that is just as identifiable to shoppers who know where to go. Since there are so many businesses on the World Wide Web there is only one organization that assigns names and stores those names in a database to ensure that every address assigned is unique.

People can apply for a unique domain name by contacting any domain name registrar. The registrar's charge a fee for the services that they provide but these fees are considered to be very reasonable. The domain name registrars work in conjunction with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The databases that they maintain contain all domains registered worldwide.

The business owner can create a unique web address and determine exactly how they want it to read to the internet customers that will visit their online business everyday. The same business name can operate on the World Wide Web but will be assigned a different hierarchy to use to ensure that it is unique to all others on the net.

Several hierarchies are used in the domain name registration process and they were created because so many people asked for a web address for one reason or another and there will probably be many others in the future because the internet grows bigger every day as more new businesses form. The most common hierarchies in use today on the internet are .com, .net, .org, and .biz.

Whichever ending the business owner chooses will be checked against the one database that holds all other domain registrations on the internet. The domain name registrar might control ownership of the requested name or the business owner might own it outright. Registering a domain name is considered to be a contract and every business owner knows that they should read and understand the contract that they sign when they apply for domain registration.