That domain names have become big business isn’t news to anyone. It is often likened to a virtual real estate business where millions of dollars are at stake. We were curious to see how the most expensive domain names are actually being used today, so we decided to find out.

Kate Donahue from Sedo was kind enough to give us a list of the 20 most expensive domain names, where they were sold and for how much.

With this list in our hands, we went through all of them to see where they lead.

Domain		Price ($)  Where did it sell?	 Where does it lead?
Sex.com	       12,000,000  Private Sale		 Ad page
Porn.com 	9,500,000  Moniker/Traffic	 Porn portal
Diamond.com	7,500,000  Private Sale		 Online store
Vodka.com	3,000,000  Sedo			 Community
Seniors.com  	1,500,000  Moniker/Traffic	 Community
Tandberg.com	1,500,000  Private Sale		 Tandberg company
Cameras.com	1,500,000  Moniker/Traffic	 Ad page
Scores.com 	1,180,000  Moniker/Traffic	 Scores&Odds
Chinese.com	1,120,008  Sedo			 Ad page
Topix.com	1,000,000  Private Sale		 Community
Poker.de  	  957,937  NICIT/DOMAINfest	 Partypoker.com
NAV.no		  717,978  Private Sale		 Norwegian Labour&Welfare
Dollars.com 	  650,000  DigiPawn.com		 Casino games
On.com		  635,000  Moniker/DomainSystems Community
Cardiology.com    550,000  Moniker		 Ad page
Macau.com	  550,000  Private Sale		 Portal for Macau
Gays.com	  500,000  Sedo			 Community
Wrestling.com	  500,000  Private Sale		 Ad page
Bike.com	  500,000  Sedo			 Ad page
Blue.com	  500,000  Sedo			 Ad page

(Visit these domain names at your own risk. Some contain material that could be considered offensive and/or popup windows.)

Some observations

Out of these 20 domain names…

7 lead to simple ad pages (some of which are parked).
5 lead to communities of some sort (dating sites, etc).
2 lead to casino or poker related sites.

The remaining 6 are a mixed bag of portals, online stores and company sites.

Interestingly, sex.com, a domain name that someone paid 12 million dollars for, is just a simple page with text link ads.

Note: Some may point out that Business.com sold for $345 million, and there may be other similar examples, but the ones listed above are stand-alone domain name sales and as far as we know don’t include an entire business as in the Business.com example.

Not that it is for sale, but one can’t help to wonder what we might get for Pingdom.com…?

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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