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Domain names, without them the web would just be a bunch of hard-to-remember IP addresses. Imagine telling your buddies, “Oh, I found this awesome site at 72.14.204.104 last night.”
And yet, many of us don’t know all that much about them. Prepare to be cured of that, because here is…
We stumbled upon an interesting statistic the other day: According to DomainTools there are more than 380 million deleted gTLD domain names, i.e. domain names that at some point have been registered but no longer exist. More than 80% of those are .com domain names.
This number needs to be put into perspective to understand how unnaturally large it is. The total number of active gTLD domain names (.com, .net, .org, etc.) today is about 118 million. We find it hard to believe that on top of these, there would have at some time existed another 380 million legitimate domain names.
So how did that number become so large? The answer is quite simple: domain tasting.
DNS, the Domain Name System, is one of the major pillars of the Internet. It’s a critical service, and without it we would all have to use IP addresses instead of handy domain names like “Pingdom.com” when we want to visit websites, send emails, and so on.
However, DNS has a huge flaw. Because DNS lacks security features it has been relatively easy for hackers to trick DNS servers with false information. By tricking DNS servers, hackers have been able to hijack entire websites. Needless to say, attacks such as these are a security nightmare and can be used for a large variety of malicious purposes such as site defacement, phishing, malware installations, and more.
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, the company that manages the .com TLD, has finally announced the first of their 7% price increases on .com domain names. On October 15, the price for a .com domain name will increase from $6 to $6.42. Their contract with ICANN allows Verisign four such price increases over six years. This will be the [...]
The Registerfly saga continues, and if possible just turned even uglier. Frustrated Registerfly customers are suing both Registerfly and ICANN. The Registerfly.com website isn’t exactly performing great either, with over 20 hours of downtime in February and almost 10 hours so far in March according to GIGRIB. You can find the full GIGRIB uptime report [...]
