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Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still.
With the Internet growing rapidly over the years, the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has increased from just a handful to about twenty, with many more proposed or in planning. Some, such as .com and .edu, have seen widespread adoption and are a useful contribution to the Internet. Others haven’t been quite as lucky. You could say they have flopped.
From domain extensions that never made it past the planning table, to those that make little sense at all, there are probably more flops than successes. Here are five of the worst TLD flops in Internet history (in no specific order).
Verisign publishes a quarterly report about the domain name industry called The Domain Name Industry Brief. The latest report, summing up Q1 2009, was just released.
Since there is always a lot of data in these reports to mull through, we decided to pick out what we think are some of the more interesting facts and figures and sum them up in this article.
This is a guest post by David Walsh from WebHostingSearch.com.
The best domain names have vanished into the interweb’s vortex. People need to be creative. Using country code top-level domains (ccTLD) to create a unique domain is a great way to play on the domain extension and the name itself, also known as a domain hack. Some ccTLDs have lost its original meaning/purpose as they are now frequently used by international companies rather than by the country’s natives. We found ten sites that have been successful in combining their name with a ccTLD.
There are now 177 million domain names across all top-level domains, which is an increase by 16% (24 million domain names) compared to a year ago.
These numbers are from the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, a quarterly report from Verisign about the growth of the domain name industry. Verisign has been doing this report a few years now, so we went back and looked at the data for 2006 and 2007 as well so we could show a wider time frame than just 2008 (to see trends, etc).
People trying to access Apple’s Mobile Me by going directly to the me.com domain yesterday were met by a 404 HTTP error response and a white screen with a single text message on it: “Not Found: Resource does not exist.”
Accessing me.com/mail worked, but anyone typing in www.me.com or me.com got the error page mentioned above and was not redirected to the login page (which is what is supposed to happen).
The domain name market is often likened to the real estate market, and a significant share of all domain names out there have been bought by people hoping to later sell them on for a greater price than what they paid for them.
The question is, how many of today’s domain names are actually held by domain name speculators?
Verisign is the registry handling the .com and .net top level domains, and they recently released statistics that can help us shed some light on this question.
As we mentioned last week, Google, in spite of already having launched their Knol website, doesn’t own the domain name Knol.com. It is owned by Dutchman Hilco Knol, who sells steam cleaning equipment on that URL.
He hasn’t sold the domain name yet, but it seems like he has been approached by Google with a six-figure [...]
Google’s new Wikipedia-competitor, Knol, has made quite a splash lately. The strange thing is, Google doesn’t own the domain name Knol.com. It belongs to a Dutch company specialized in steam cleaning equipment.
(Google’s Knol website is located at knol.google.com.)
A burst of traffic to Knol.com
The Knol.com website (i.e. the one not owned by Google) received a big [...]
Google owns a whole bunch of domain names other than the obvious ones like google.com, blogger.com and gmail.com. We here at Pingdom decided to find out which ones, with some truly surprising results.
We only looked at .com domain names, and found thousands. Below are some of the more noteworthy .com domain names that Google owns.
Misspellings [...]
