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A domain name, like www.coolexample.com, is a lot like a street address for a house or business. Let's use the White House as an example. The street address, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is an exact location — like an IP address. You might not know the exact street address, but when you visit Washington, D.C., you can tell your cabbie that you want to visit the White House and still get there. This is how a domain name is used: It's an easy way to reach the exact location of a website without having to remember its numeric address.

Anyone can register a domain. All you need is a good name, an account with Forward Web, and an acceptable form of payment.

Yes. Registering a domain extension reserves it so that no one else can use it. So if you've got mydomain.com, you might be wise to also register mydomain.net and mydomain.org (and redirect them back to your correct site) in order to avoid confusion and keep your visitors coming to your site.

In order to register any domain, you must provide certain personal information that you may not wish to be publicly searchable in the Whois database. Signing up for Whois Privacy Protection is a great way to keep your registration data private. Whois Privacy Protection acts as a "shield" for your searchable information, displaying the address, phone number, and email of the domain registrar (Forward Web, e.g.) instead of your own. Keep in mind that Whois Privacy Protection is an optional security add-on that must be renewed separately when you renew your domain.

Nameservers are the Internet's equivalent to phone books. A nameserver maintains a directory of domain names that match certain IP addresses (computers). The information from all the nameservers across the Internet is gathered in a central registry.

Nameservers make it possible for visitors to access your website using a familiar domain name, instead of having to remember a series of numbers.

Usually, a domain name is not available for re-registration as soon as it expires. Most registrars allow a grace period that can be as short as one or two weeks or as long as a year for registrants to renew expired domain names. The actual grace period can be different for each individual registrar and domain name extension. That is, the grace period for a .com domain name might be different from the grace period for a .us domain name, even at the same registrar.