Howdy,

When a domain is registered, it requires the services of two Domain Name Servers. DNS Servers allow a name to be resolved into the ip address format. Browsers generally hide the workings of this name to address and back translation. In the Windows® registry are entries for what will be prepended when a user inputs an address for the browser to locate. things like http://, http://www., ftp://, and etc. These generally find the named URL, but fail when the names tried don't exist in the DNS database for a given domain.

Typically, when a domain is registered, at least one 'A NAME' record is created in DNS, which points to an ip address. Very often, a 'CNAME' record is also created, for www, which points to the name .whatever_is_the_actual_domain_name.com contained in that 'A NAME' record. The difference here is that an 'A NAME' points to an ip address while a 'CNAME' points to the name contained in an 'A NAME' record. A single ip address can have several 'A NAME' records, and a single 'A NAME' record can have several 'CNAME' records pointing to it. That's why the typed URL 'domain.com' will work in a browser when 'www.domain.com' fails, because the former is always created and the latter is an add-on. This assumes that webserver software is actually running on the machine at the ip address contained in the 'A NAME' record. . .

William