What do you call the entire first part of a URL?

Question

If I have a URL like:

http://www.example.com:9090/test.html

Then I know that www.example.com is the host name, but what do you

Answer 1

• http:// - Protocol
• www - Server-Name (subdomain)
• example - Second Level Domain (SLD)
• com - Top Level Domain (TLD)
• 9090 - Port number
• /test.html - Path

Save the protocol, you can refer to 'www.example.com' as either the hostname or - more specifically - the 'fully qualified domain name'.

Toss in the '9090' and personally I'd be comfortable calling it the host, as that's usually what you'd get as the 'host' header in an HTTP request; something like 'host: www.example.com:9090'. In PHP it would be stored in the $_SERVER variable under 'HTTP_HOST' or 'SERVER_NAME'. In JavaScript it would be available as the document.location.host.

I dunno what you could call it once you toss in 'http://' :(

Answer 2

It means that the HTTP server hosting example.com is using the port 9090 for processing HTTP requests, it is a directive to the browser that it should connect to that server on port 9090 instead of 80 which it normally does if the port is not specified