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What is HTTP Protocol?Explosive Growth of WebsitesIf you have a small business, it's pretty much a necessity to get on the Web, but it's become quite difficult to find a snappy URL that describes your business. Why? The competition for good URLs is intense. As of June of 2007, there were 138 million Web site domain names registered worldwide. Out of all web sites, about half are active sites. They are the sites that are busy and are updated periodically. Bloggers, small businesses, and the simplicity of setting up a website have combined to cause the dramatic growth in web sites, much of it in just the past two years.
Most of the dictionary-word kind of domain names (like business.com, house.com, furniture.com) have already been taken, but that doesn't mean you should give up the search for a domain name that is easy to remember and could boost your traffic.
Popular ProtocolsMost of us are very accustomed to the string "http:" that we use it without thinking. In fact, many times we even omit the http prefix when we enter the URL for a Web site we're looking for. It's so common that we don't bother to type it in. Along with http:, there are other well known strings that we use frequently, although not as often as http:. The mailto: URL prefix allows us to send email. News: lets us browse newsgroups. Additionally, there's ftp: and gopher: protocols. But how many of us actually know what a Protocol is? First of all, protocols are a set of rules that define proper behavior in different situations. For the Internet, a protocol is a set of rules that determines how a certain resource is to be accessed. When you type http://www.microsoft.com into the address bar of your browser, you are telling the browser to use the rules of the HTTP protocol to get in touch with the server at www.microsoft.com.
If you think that http: is just a fancy word like hocus-pocus, you're somewhat right. There's nothing really magic about HTTP or any other protocol name. In fact, you could create your own custom protocol and name it using whatever word you would like to use. You could call it Abracadabra and then specify how it should access your resources.
What is a Domain Name
For example, http://www.usatoday.com is the World Wide Website (www) for the USAToday newspaper which is a commercial business (.com). You may also see the URL in another form, which is basically the same thing as the first format except that it doesn't have the www: http://usatoday.com The http:// means that the address is a HyperText Transfer Protocol. When you click on a hyperlink you are asking that a page be transferred to your browser using the http protocol. This is what happens.
The right most part of the domain name or Top Level Domain (TLD), can also be a two-letter abbreviation for the country in which the computer resides, for which there are more than 250 abbreviations. Such as “ca” for Canada and “uk” for United Kingdom. The United States abbreviation is "us", but it is more common for a site in the United States to use a specialized TLD such as edu (educational institution), gov (government), mil (military), com (commercial), biz (business), int (international), net (network), or org (organization). These are the most popular, but there are others suffixes. Click here to see the Norid list of Top Level Domain name registries from around the world
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There
were just 18,000 Web sites when Netcraft, based in Bath, England, began
keeping track in August of 1995. It took until May of 2004 to
reach the 50 million milestone; then only 30 months later, it hit 100
million, in October 2006.
Each
protocol has its own set of rules and will thus behave differently based
on those rules. Depending on how the protocol has been designed, it
might also need a 
A
system of Internet addresses or 
