--- title: Understanding Domains, Subdomains, DNS, and Load Balancers description: A beginner-friendly walkthrough of how a URL request travels through the internet infrastructure. Covers domains (registered names like company.ca), subdomains... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/understanding-domains-subdomains-dns-and-load-balancers-rawvialef twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Understanding Domains, Subdomains, DNS, and Load Balancers | daily.dev og:description: A beginner-friendly walkthrough of how a URL request travels through the internet infrastructure. Covers domains (registered names like company.ca), subdomains... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/understanding-domains-subdomains-dns-and-load-balancers-rawvialef og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/raWViALEF.png og:image:alt: Understanding Domains, Subdomains, DNS, and Load Balancers og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Understanding Domains, Subdomains, DNS, and Load Balancers **[C\# Corner](https://daily.dev/sources/csharpcorner)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A beginner-friendly walkthrough of how a URL request travels through the internet infrastructure. Covers domains (registered names like company.ca), subdomains (logical divisions like api.company.ca), DNS resolution (mapping hostnames to IP addresses), load balancers (distributing traffic across servers for high availability and fault tolerance), and HTTPS/TLS termination at the load balancer level. Includes a step-by-step example of a full request lifecycle. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is the difference between a domain and a subdomain? A domain is the registered internet name you purchase from a registrar (e.g., company.ca). A subdomain is a free logical division created under that domain (e.g., api.company.ca, payments.company.ca). You only pay to register the root domain; subdomains can be created at no additional registration cost and typically route to different services or departments. _Developers building multi-service architectures track subdomain and DNS patterns on daily.dev._ ### Why does a public DNS record point to a load balancer IP instead of the web server IP? The public IP exposed in DNS typically belongs to a load balancer, not the web server itself. The load balancer receives all incoming traffic and distributes it across multiple backend servers, providing high availability, fault tolerance, better performance, and easy scaling. If one server goes offline, the load balancer automatically routes requests to a healthy server without any DNS change. _Teams designing scalable backend infrastructure find architecture discussions like this on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [DNS Explained - How Domain Names Get Resolved](https://daily.dev/posts/dns-explained---how-domain-names-get-resolved-zhpljm8wy) · Hacker News · 3 upvotes · 0 comments - [VirtualHost And Subdomains](https://daily.dev/posts/virtualhost-and-subdomains-a2adtn2yh) · InfoSec Write-ups · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [From Clicking Websites to Understanding the Internet: My Networking Journey](https://daily.dev/posts/from-clicking-websites-to-understanding-the-internet-my-networking-journey-hhd7n7v8e) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#networking](https://daily.dev/tags/networking), [#dns](https://daily.dev/tags/dns) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/understanding-domains-subdomains-dns-and-load-balancers-rawvialef) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Understanding Domains, Subdomains, DNS, and Load Balancers","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/understanding-domains-subdomains-dns-and-load-balancers-rawvialef","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/understanding-domains-subdomains-dns-and-load-balancers-rawvialef"},"datePublished":"2026-08-10T08:14:29.374Z","dateModified":"2026-09-13T21:45:40.749Z","description":"A beginner-friendly walkthrough of how a URL request travels through the internet infrastructure. 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