Domain name is the address of your website that people type in the browser URL bar to visit your website. If you are running your own Traccar server and want clients to access it using an easy to remember name (e.g. track.example.com) instead of an IP address (e.g. 198.51.100.200), you need to register and assign a domain name to the IP address of your server.
Another good reason for having a domain name is ability to secure connection to the web app. Valid SSL cerficates require a domain name. It's not possible to get a publicly valid certificate for an IP address.
Unless you already own a domain name, first thing you have to do is to purchase a domain name from a domain registrar. There are a lot of good options available, but we recommend NameSilo. We use it for all our domains. It provides consistently high reliability and cheap prices for both initial registration and renewals:
You have to renew domain name every year or you can prepay several years in advance. Most domain registrars will provide a DNS server for your domain by default.
After you registered a domain name you have to configure DNS records to point to your IP address. You need to add an A record with your server IP address as a value.
Each provider uses slightly different interface for configuration. Here are detailed steps for NameSilo:
It might take about 15 minutes or in some cases more for your changes to propagate. After that you should be able to access your server using your custom domain name.