What is Domain Sharding?
Domain sharding is a technique for dividing resources between several domains. This will improve loading speed and search engine results. With multiple domains, browsers can load more resources simultaneously, improving the website visitors’ experience.
In the first step, you should choose a suitable name for your website, and in other words, find your domain name by considering the important principles in this field, and then check on sites that provide server and domain services, whether the domain is the one you want for free or not. To check international domains, you can go to whois.com and to whois.nic.ir for domestic domains. However, you should not forget that you must do the necessary research before choosing a domain name and its related items to avoid problems.
Brand name, the best choice!
Your domain name is the phrase that your users know by this name, so you should be careful when choosing it. Our suggestion in this regard is to use your brand name as a domain name because this way, you will not confuse your customers or users with different names and titles.
A simple but effective point
When choosing a domain name, you should remember to use as few English vowels as possible. This is especially important and challenging for us Farsi speakers. A Persian word that is the name of your brand may be spelled in different ways, which can definitely confuse some of your users.
The Persian name remains in the memory!
It is better for Iranian businesses or companies to use Persian names because a large percentage of their customers and audiences are Persian speakers. When your domain name is a meaningful Persian word, it will be much easier for the audience to remember it. Our research in this field has shown that businesses that choose an English name for their domain will have a more difficult path ahead.
Choose a unique name.
Try not to make your domain name similar to any other business, as experience has shown that you are helping that business more than you are helping yourself. Even if you get the idea to choose a domain name that has already been used and use “-” and… to solve the problem, you will not get a good result. So, as a result, you should try to choose a name that is less commonly seen on the Internet.
The most crucial point in choosing a domain
Be careful in choosing the site extension, because the types of site extensions and internet domain extensions have their meaning, and it is better to use them wisely. In the following, we introduce the main TLD examples to you:
- Gov: Abbreviation of the word Government
- ac: Abbreviation of the word Academy, which means an educational institution
- info: Abbreviation of the word Information, which means information
- biz: Abbreviation of the word Business, meaning business
- org: Abbreviation of the word Organization, which means Organization
- net: Abbreviation of the word Network meaning network
- com: Abbreviation of the word Commercial
Internet domains
The best way to know the types of internet domains is to know each of them and their characteristics. For this reason, in the rest of this section, by defining each of the available internet domains, we will help you to know which type is better to use before choosing a domain, and in other words, what are the features and characteristics of each domain. It provides you with facilities.
Main domain
The main domain is the address of your site where you do all your business activities and where users enter. You should remember that you can only have one main domain on a hosting service, and the other domains you define for your site are known as subdomains. Your official website address will be the main domain.
What is a subdomain?
A subdomain is a prefix placed before a site’s domain name and is used to promote purposes such as information, organization, shopping, etc. on your site. For example, a subdomain website for a blog can be blog.Yourdomain.com.
What is Edan Domain?
Edan domain or Edan domain is a domain added to a host with the main domain, but separate content is displayed. The way to manage these domains is through the main domain account, and you can easily do the necessary checks from the file management section by using it. You should know this essential thing about Edan domains:Y: You cannot run them on any host, and if you intend to use this type of domain, it is better to plan the purchase or choose the host according to this.
What is a domain park?
These domains are parked on the so-called main domain, and they work by showing the content on the site and the main domain to the users. By using the domain park, you can have different domains with different extensions together. When the user goes to one of them, they will go directly to the main domain with your main extension and can use the facilities and content on your site.
Approximate price of domains
The approximate price of domains depends on the type of their extension and the domain’s validity period. Because many domains with foreign extensions, such as (US, UK, etc.), have a higher price, and on the other hand, some extensions are for special uses, and their application can lead to additional steps and specific complications. In this way, the costs related to the domain purchase will be higher. Another thing that makes us unable to provide you, readers, with specific price ranges at the moment is the state of the currency market, which fluctuates a lot every day and may amuse you.
By default, web browsers limit the number of active connections per domain when loading a website. When the resources required to download (images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) are more than usual, visitors will experience slow loading speed problems because the downloads are queued.
To solve this problem, web services ( for more information, read the article ” What is a web service ?” ) divide the content between several subdomains. Each additional domain allows multiple connections. The active surplus can be opened. This operation generally allows visitors to get more resources from the same source.
What happens in Domain sharding?
When a user connects to a web page, their browser scans the HTML to find resources to download. Usually, these resources for internet domain registration are provided by only one domain: the domain providing the web page or the domain dedicated to providing the resources. Using domain sharding, the user’s browser connects to two or more different domains simultaneously and downloads the resources needed to load the page.
Determine the number of domains.
The number of shards used by a web service depends on the resources that users must download. Modern web browsers support an average of 6 simultaneous downloads from each domain. This amount is divided between all the resources needed to load the website. For example, a website has 30 resources and should be downloaded in 6 consecutive requests for each user.
Adding multiple domains can also cause performance issues. Web browsers must perform a DNS lookup for each additional domain and maintain the connection with those domains. This operation itself will slow down the loading speed. A study by Yahoo! has been done, which shows that between 2 and 4 domains is the most optimal number of domains used for this operation, and any more domains will decrease the performance.
Domain sharding and SPDY operations
Google’s SPDY protocol has provided support for multiple simultaneous requests. This protocol, similar to domain sharding, solves the problem raised in this article without requiring any special setup. Although domain sharding is used by a small fraction of websites, it is used by huge websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress.
It is worth mentioning that with the final presentation of HTTP/2, this new version of HTTP will completely replace SPDY and domain sharding in 2016, and there will be no need to use these techniques.
An example of Domain Sharding
YouTube, a video file sharing website, has divided video resources and scripts into two domains: i.ytimg.com and s.ytimg.com. i.ytimg.com contains icons, logos, thumbnails, avatars, and other visual effects. In contrast, s.ytimg.com contains JavaScript, CSS, favicons, sprite sheets, and other parts related to optimization and analytical and statistical information about the website.
Users visiting the YouTube.com website automatically download scripts and media required to load the website.
A web server can handle the domain name since browsers recognize domains based on their name instead of their IP address. You can use this technique if the server has enough capacity to perform this operation and can support multiple simultaneous connections.
benefits of Domain sharding
Domain technique is a proven tool to improve the performance of websites.
Due to the simultaneous downloading of resources instead of sequentially, users will see improved performance, and companies will also see increased visitor satisfaction.
Companies and visitors will also experience improved bandwidth usage, allowing more resources to be delivered at higher speeds.
Conclusion
On average, 50% of requests to 30,000 URLs are made on one domain. This is a very long time for downloading information and queuing, especially when one download must be completed before another download can begin. The domain can significantly improve a website’s performance without creating complexity.
Always use Domain Sharding; you must do a free or registered domain search correctly.
