A domain name is very similar to an address forwarding service. The domain is the address that people type in their web browser. The domain then points to the "real" address that contains your web site. The "real" address is the address of your location on the server that contains your web site files and is called the IP address. The reason the IP address is not used is because it is a series of numbers. For most, this would be very difficult to remember. Instead, a domain name, made up of letters and words is used.