May 5, 2016 at 11:21Domains: A History of Internet Length
At the very beginning of the existence of the Internet, information about all then very few computers connected to the Network was stored in etc / hosts files. These text files were used (and are still used) when translating domain names into network addresses of nodes. However, in just two years, there were more than a thousand hosts, and traffic problems began. With the development of the Internet infrastructure, a system was needed that would streamline information that is constantly growing in volume. This is how domains of various hierarchy levels arose. Gradually, a fan was added to the naming process - they began to put different meanings in the names of sites and in top-level domains, coming up with interesting options and combinations. Domains have become a special world. REG.RU , as a registrar, is part of this world. And we have a story to tell.
Strictly speaking, it is wrong to call a domain name a domain. This is jargon. A website address on the Internet is the fully qualified domain name (more precisely, the FQDN, the fully qualified domain name), which includes:
The whole set of domains at different levels makes up the full domain name - a unique website address on the Web. These unique addresses are recognized and interpreted by the DNS (Domain Name System), a system for obtaining domain information. In fact, the beauty of the name of your DNS site is completely indifferent, it needsyour clothes, boots and motorcycle information about the IP address to connect to the host. And domain names are intended, first of all, for convenient remembering and identification of the website address. They take part in the formation of the company's image in the same way as the trademark, name, packaging design and so on. This is the starting point of visibility on the Web, without which it is difficult to survive almost any business.
Domain names are needed by anyone who wants to broadcast information about their own company / business / project on the Internet, which means that sooner or later they will have to come up with a name and register it. By the way, if you have such a need, at REG.RU you will find many interesting tools for selecting a name in any domain zone. Moreover, now when you register a domain, you can get 2 months of hosting for free and an SSL certificate for a year as a gift . Advertising break is over, continue.
As the experience of mankind has repeatedly shown, everything that has value in terms of influencing the memory / psyche / consciousness of a potential consumer sooner or later becomes the object of war, disputes, scams, major and not very deals. As a result, a valuable object is surrounded by myths, legends and beautiful stories. Domains (away from excessive technological snobbery, we will call them that) are no exception.
One of the first top-level domains in the hierarchy is .COM , which has existed since January 1985. At first it was managed by the US Department of Defense, but soon the domain was transferred to SRI International. Initially, the .COM zone was created to establish addresses of commercial companies. The first domain in this zone was symbolics.com (appeared March 15, 1985). Now .COM does not impose any obligations on the owner - the site can be of any orientation, and this top-level domain is still the most popular international domain.
During its existence, he managed to become a byword because of the so-called dotcom crisis. In world economic practice, it is customary to call a dotcom any business based on work through the Internet (Internet companies). In the very end of the 90s dotcoms went public IPOs, their market value grew every day. Analysts had expected NASDAQ to break the 6,000-pound bar thanks to high-tech stocks. The dotcom bubble burst quickly enough: after gaining strength and increasing the value of stocks in about 6 years, numerous Internet companies crashed and initiated bankruptcy due to the ineffective business model. The reason lay in the huge amounts of attracted loans spent on advertising and finding new investors, and not on product development. In March 2000, the NASDAQ collapsed, then already in 2002 I found the mark of 1100 points. IT companies went bankrupt and liquidated one after another, even shares of giants like Sun and Cisco lost 60-80% in price. That was the first dotcom fall. Of course, the .COM domain alone has nothing to do with it, but its name has gone down in the history of economics forever.
At present, there are 125 620 040 domains in .COM zone. By the way, corporations used the .COR domain name before dotcoms.
Some noteworthy stories about the .COM zone
By the way, about the most expensive (not a rating, just individual names by ear):
There are a lot of such examples. It is noteworthy that part of these crazy deals is connected with the name of the person who received the informal status of the king of domains. This is the president and co-founder of the first TRAFFIC domain conference, Rick Schwartz. The first domain name LipService.com he acquired in December 1995, paying $ 100. Agree, a serious investment. However, a few years later, Rick entered into millions of transactions. For example, he sold the domain Men.com for $ 1.32 million. Schwartz was the first to realize the value of direct traffic when users do not search the site through a search engine, but drive a remembered domain name into a browser line (feel the power of investing in a good domain name?). Well, then it went, went:
The .COM domain has become an integral part of international business, the names in this zone are the subject of the most expensive transactions in the history of domain names. Around the dotcoms are concentrated cybersquatters, hackers and amateurs from all over the world.
.ORG domain The
situation with the .ORG top-level domain is slightly different. It appeared in 1985, along with .COM, and has been around for 30 years. The .ORG domain is created for non-profit organizations, charitable foundations, volunteers, cultural and scientific projects. For example, on January 13, 2001, Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) started working on it. On 04.04.2016, there are 10 911 485 domain names in the .ORG domain. This is the third leader after the top-level domain. NET (15 653 571 domain names).
You can talk about the .ORG domain for a very long time, as well as about its "residents". But it’s better to read and watch the anniversary timeline infographics slowly - this is really very interesting. Steeper and not tell.
Probably, there is not a single person on Habr who would not hear about the domain zone. The Russian Federation, in which there are 878,144 domains. Meanwhile, this is far from the only "national fraction" of domain names in the native language. ICANN is positioning the creation of domain names in national languages as almost the main task of creating a truly global Internet. Therefore, the organization takes all measures to ensure the full functioning of both site names and email associated with such domains. At the moment, things have progressed furthest for the Arab segment, however, there are domains for Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese and other characters.
In addition, domains with an outline in the national language are already appearing among the new top-level domains new gTLDs (generic Top-Level Domain). For example, in Chinese. 网址 (.URL) - 338 008 domains, in Chinese. 商城 ("shopping center") - 12 782 domains, etc.
But how does DNS understand them?
It's simple: multilingual domains are transferred to the DNS system in a transformed form. On the client side, there is a conversion from UNICODE to ASCII compatible code (ACE - ASCII Compatible Encoding) - strings consisting of UNICODE characters are represented using lowercase Latin letters and numbers. That is, just in the form of those characters that DNS easily perceives and subsequently returns the client's IP address.
Such a conversion is necessary because not all DNS servers support the processing of domain names in IDN format. The method for converting sequences of Unicode characters into ACE sequences is called the Punycode algorithm (punicode for .RF - xn - p1ai).
Short facts about national domains
A national domain is a necessary attribute of a business that wants to develop in each of the regions. Familiar letters at the end of a domain name are subconsciously associated with the user’s home country, are easier to remember, trust is higher So, loyalty to the company owning the site is growing.
Obviously, over the years the Internet has existed, millions of domains have been registered in existing zones. The chances of getting the right and / or sonorous name became less and less. The world could not do without them, and they appeared - new gTLDs, new domains with meaningful, commercial and even humorous names. To New gTLD Listincludes about 1000 top-level domain zones. In total, over 15 million addresses are registered in them, among which the names in the zones .XYZ, .TOP, .WANG, .WIN are leading (this is for winners in life, and not what you thought), .CLUB. You can meet unexpected or, on the contrary, very expected names: .ONLINE, .XXX, .PARTY, .RED, .SPACE, .LOL, .SEX, .OOO, .COFFEE, etc. Geodomains live here: .MOSCOW, .BERLIN .LONDON. Thousands of domain names are registered in these zones annually, and all of them serve a good service to business.
Here are a few more examples from the list of new domain zones where you can find unusual and catchy names:
Finally, there are some interesting full domain names (website addresses) that will clearly please readers:
Here it is, the real six-level domain.
We basically did not publish vulgar and ambiguous domain names, which everyone has long been aware of. By the way, the fact of the existence of numerous posts and articles on this topic speaks only about one thing: the name of the site today is as important as the logo, slogan and name of the company. The name can cause hatred, love, virality, ridicule, what to choose - depends on the commercial purpose of the company or private owner. You can refine yourself as you like, remember one thing: as you name your site, it starts.
Strictly speaking, it is wrong to call a domain name a domain. This is jargon. A website address on the Internet is the fully qualified domain name (more precisely, the FQDN, the fully qualified domain name), which includes:
- domain name of the second, third, fourth, etc. level - the name allocated to the owner of the resource, excluding the domain of the first (top) level (.COM, .RU, etc.) and the domain of the zero (root) level (.) ;
- domain zone (top or first level domain) - designation of belonging to a geographical (.RU, .EU, .KZ) or thematic zone (.EDU, .GOV, .AERO, .ORG, .COM, .BIZ, .NET) .
The whole set of domains at different levels makes up the full domain name - a unique website address on the Web. These unique addresses are recognized and interpreted by the DNS (Domain Name System), a system for obtaining domain information. In fact, the beauty of the name of your DNS site is completely indifferent, it needs
Domain names are needed by anyone who wants to broadcast information about their own company / business / project on the Internet, which means that sooner or later they will have to come up with a name and register it. By the way, if you have such a need, at REG.RU you will find many interesting tools for selecting a name in any domain zone. Moreover, now when you register a domain, you can get 2 months of hosting for free and an SSL certificate for a year as a gift . Advertising break is over, continue.
As the experience of mankind has repeatedly shown, everything that has value in terms of influencing the memory / psyche / consciousness of a potential consumer sooner or later becomes the object of war, disputes, scams, major and not very deals. As a result, a valuable object is surrounded by myths, legends and beautiful stories. Domains (away from excessive technological snobbery, we will call them that) are no exception.
Living Legends: .COM and .ORG
One of the first top-level domains in the hierarchy is .COM , which has existed since January 1985. At first it was managed by the US Department of Defense, but soon the domain was transferred to SRI International. Initially, the .COM zone was created to establish addresses of commercial companies. The first domain in this zone was symbolics.com (appeared March 15, 1985). Now .COM does not impose any obligations on the owner - the site can be of any orientation, and this top-level domain is still the most popular international domain.
During its existence, he managed to become a byword because of the so-called dotcom crisis. In world economic practice, it is customary to call a dotcom any business based on work through the Internet (Internet companies). In the very end of the 90s dotcoms went public IPOs, their market value grew every day. Analysts had expected NASDAQ to break the 6,000-pound bar thanks to high-tech stocks. The dotcom bubble burst quickly enough: after gaining strength and increasing the value of stocks in about 6 years, numerous Internet companies crashed and initiated bankruptcy due to the ineffective business model. The reason lay in the huge amounts of attracted loans spent on advertising and finding new investors, and not on product development. In March 2000, the NASDAQ collapsed, then already in 2002 I found the mark of 1100 points. IT companies went bankrupt and liquidated one after another, even shares of giants like Sun and Cisco lost 60-80% in price. That was the first dotcom fall. Of course, the .COM domain alone has nothing to do with it, but its name has gone down in the history of economics forever.
At present, there are 125 620 040 domains in .COM zone. By the way, corporations used the .COR domain name before dotcoms.
Some noteworthy stories about the .COM zone
- http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ - a domain with a great history. This site was coined by 21-year-old Alex Tew, who did not have enough money to graduate. On August 26, 2005, he began selling each pixel for $ 1 (minimum order of 10x10 pixels). Buyers bought a place and posted images and links on this site with a peculiar viral effect. The last pixel was sold on eBay for $ 38,100. The main site is still alive and clickable (and there is even an advertisement for The Times newspaper there).
- http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com - the longest name in the .COM zone belongs to one Welsh village. Now the site is not related to it and is a parked domain for referral earnings.
- According to VeriSign, the most popular words used in .COM domain names are “home” (1.2 million), “online” (1 million) and “land” (891 thousand).
- The business.com domain was sold for between $ 340 and $ 360 million, which is roughly equal to the annual budget of the Maldives or Sierra Leone.
- On September 28, 2015, a former Google employee, Sanmay Ved, used the Google Domains service and found that Google.com was free. The Vedas bought it for $ 12. The story from the lips of Sanmai himself can be read on his Linkedin . For those who are too lazy, the end is this: Sanmay reported the incident to Google Security, an internal investigation has begun. The corporation offered a reward, but Sanmai refused and asked to transfer the amount to the Art of Living India fund, which provides free comprehensive education for children from Indian slums. Google doubled the amount and transferred it to the fund, in the interests of the company details of the results of the investigation and the amount of remuneration were not disclosed.
- In 2015, the most expensive domain was Porno.com, acquired back in February last year for $ 8,888,888. The second and third places were shared by PX.com and 588.com domains - $ 1 million each.
By the way, about the most expensive (not a rating, just individual names by ear):
- sex.com - $ 13,000,000 (2010),
- Fund.com - $ 9,999,950 (2008),
- Porn.com - $ 9,500,000 (2007),
- Bingo.com - $ 8,000,000 (2014),
- Diamond.com - $ 7,500,000 (2006),
- Toys.com - $ 5,100,000 (2009),
- Vodka.com - $ 3,000,000 (2006),
- Computer.com - $ 2,100,000 (2007),
- Russia.com - $ 1,500,000 (2009),
- eBet.com - $ 1,350,000 (2013),
- MM.com - $ 1,200,000 (2014).
There are a lot of such examples. It is noteworthy that part of these crazy deals is connected with the name of the person who received the informal status of the king of domains. This is the president and co-founder of the first TRAFFIC domain conference, Rick Schwartz. The first domain name LipService.com he acquired in December 1995, paying $ 100. Agree, a serious investment. However, a few years later, Rick entered into millions of transactions. For example, he sold the domain Men.com for $ 1.32 million. Schwartz was the first to realize the value of direct traffic when users do not search the site through a search engine, but drive a remembered domain name into a browser line (feel the power of investing in a good domain name?). Well, then it went, went:
- Schwartz registered the eBet.com domain name in 1996 for $ 100, and almost 20 years later sold it to Network Solutions for $ 1.35 million.
- He sold the candy.com domain name for $ 3 million to the confectionery company G&J Holdings.
- He registered porno.com in 1997 for $ 42,000. After that, he earned over $ 10 million in advertising and redirects. Well, in February 2015, as mentioned above, he sold the domain for $ 8,888,888.
The .COM domain has become an integral part of international business, the names in this zone are the subject of the most expensive transactions in the history of domain names. Around the dotcoms are concentrated cybersquatters, hackers and amateurs from all over the world.
.ORG domain The
situation with the .ORG top-level domain is slightly different. It appeared in 1985, along with .COM, and has been around for 30 years. The .ORG domain is created for non-profit organizations, charitable foundations, volunteers, cultural and scientific projects. For example, on January 13, 2001, Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) started working on it. On 04.04.2016, there are 10 911 485 domain names in the .ORG domain. This is the third leader after the top-level domain. NET (15 653 571 domain names).
You can talk about the .ORG domain for a very long time, as well as about its "residents". But it’s better to read and watch the anniversary timeline infographics slowly - this is really very interesting. Steeper and not tell.
National
Probably, there is not a single person on Habr who would not hear about the domain zone. The Russian Federation, in which there are 878,144 domains. Meanwhile, this is far from the only "national fraction" of domain names in the native language. ICANN is positioning the creation of domain names in national languages as almost the main task of creating a truly global Internet. Therefore, the organization takes all measures to ensure the full functioning of both site names and email associated with such domains. At the moment, things have progressed furthest for the Arab segment, however, there are domains for Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese and other characters.
In addition, domains with an outline in the national language are already appearing among the new top-level domains new gTLDs (generic Top-Level Domain). For example, in Chinese. 网址 (.URL) - 338 008 domains, in Chinese. 商城 ("shopping center") - 12 782 domains, etc.
But how does DNS understand them?
It's simple: multilingual domains are transferred to the DNS system in a transformed form. On the client side, there is a conversion from UNICODE to ASCII compatible code (ACE - ASCII Compatible Encoding) - strings consisting of UNICODE characters are represented using lowercase Latin letters and numbers. That is, just in the form of those characters that DNS easily perceives and subsequently returns the client's IP address.
Such a conversion is necessary because not all DNS servers support the processing of domain names in IDN format. The method for converting sequences of Unicode characters into ACE sequences is called the Punycode algorithm (punicode for .RF - xn - p1ai).
Short facts about national domains
- Zone.RF is the first Cyrillic domain zone in the world.
- The first domain names in the zone.RF were President.RF and Government.RF.
- Before the creation of top-level domains in national languages, non-Latin alphabets were used only in the spelling of domains of the second and lower levels.
- The Spanish-speaking countries were the first to revolt - Chile introduced domain names with the letter ñ (which became possible to use from the end of 2001) and other diacritical marks.
- In EU countries, permission to use diacritics (which are abundant, for example, in German and French) has not led to a rapid increase in the registration of such domains, in contrast to countries with the Cyrillic alphabet, in particular Russia. Someone explains this by the reluctance to separate the audience (nevertheless, a single European Union = single consumer), someone - the lack of desire for ethnic self-identification (which is hardly fair and, rather, far-fetched, for example, for the French, literally obsessed with love for their language ) But everything can be even simpler: the use of the Latin alphabet allows you to replace the sound attached to the diacritic with a letter combination and get a correctly sounding domain without superscript and subscript characters.
- On the REG.RU website it is already possible to register a domain name in the .RU zone , if you have domains in the .РФ or .RU zones. Take your time - it will be available to all comers, and then for some names have a 24 May
to warbargain. We also have metropolitan domains .MOSCOW and.MOSCOW and New gTLD.ONLINE, .KIDS,. SITE. - The national top-level domain for Malaysia .MY is the fastest growing among Asian representatives. Introduced in 1987. Until March 27, 2008 in the Malaysian .MY domain it was possible to register only third-level names in seven second-level domains: COM.MY, NET.MY, ORG.MY, GOV.MY, EDU.MY, MIL.MY and NAME.MY . Today you can register any of the names available. We do not urge you to try your luck, like Rick Schwartz, but such a domain will not hurt international business, Asian markets are trending today.
- Another noteworthy national domain is .SU (119,060 domain names), a top-level domain for the USSR (Soviet Union). It was registered on September 19, 1990 on behalf of the UNIX User Association (Soviet UNIX User's Group) (at the Kurchatov Institute). After a series of upheavals and formal conservation, he remained alive, domain name registration is available in it.
- The top-level domain .RU was lit in two songs: Beznadega.ru and the legendary WWW.Leningrad (spb.ru).
A national domain is a necessary attribute of a business that wants to develop in each of the regions. Familiar letters at the end of a domain name are subconsciously associated with the user’s home country, are easier to remember, trust is higher So, loyalty to the company owning the site is growing.
Fancy names and new domains
Obviously, over the years the Internet has existed, millions of domains have been registered in existing zones. The chances of getting the right and / or sonorous name became less and less. The world could not do without them, and they appeared - new gTLDs, new domains with meaningful, commercial and even humorous names. To New gTLD Listincludes about 1000 top-level domain zones. In total, over 15 million addresses are registered in them, among which the names in the zones .XYZ, .TOP, .WANG, .WIN are leading (this is for winners in life, and not what you thought), .CLUB. You can meet unexpected or, on the contrary, very expected names: .ONLINE, .XXX, .PARTY, .RED, .SPACE, .LOL, .SEX, .OOO, .COFFEE, etc. Geodomains live here: .MOSCOW, .BERLIN .LONDON. Thousands of domain names are registered in these zones annually, and all of them serve a good service to business.
Here are a few more examples from the list of new domain zones where you can find unusual and catchy names:
- .WTF— indignantly-questioning domain,
- .KOSHER - for their own,
- .NINJA - for real ninjas.
Finally, there are some interesting full domain names (website addresses) that will clearly please readers:
- "Habr" will appreciate http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.eu/ - and this is not just fun, but a site entirely dedicated to the number "pi", including cufflinks in the form of this symbol.
- http://urka.ru/ - well, this collegium of lawyers from the Urals has clearly planned everything, we do not believe in coincidences. Interestingly, the site is ready for the habraeffect?
- dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com - there was an answer to the basic question of web development.
Here it is, the real six-level domain.
We basically did not publish vulgar and ambiguous domain names, which everyone has long been aware of. By the way, the fact of the existence of numerous posts and articles on this topic speaks only about one thing: the name of the site today is as important as the logo, slogan and name of the company. The name can cause hatred, love, virality, ridicule, what to choose - depends on the commercial purpose of the company or private owner. You can refine yourself as you like, remember one thing: as you name your site, it starts.