Due to the popularity of our previous article on the 10 top domain name facts, here are ten more juicy bits to satisfy your endless craving for information. Actually there are more than 10 facts as the eagle-eyed will notice.
Most expensive domain name
At the time of writing, the expensive domain name is CarInsurance.com which was bought by QuinStreet for $49.7 million.
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QuinStreet, a publicly traded digital and performance marketing company, has also purchased other expensive domain names like Insurance.com, Internet.com and Insure.com for $35.6 million, $18 million and $16 million, respectively. In fact, four of the top 10 most expensive domain names are with QuinStreet.
But…(and there is almost always a “but”)
Domain name worth $872 million?
The domain name cars.com is worth approximately $872 million based on the documents filed with the US Government.
In 2014, Gannett Company, Inc., who had owned a part of Cars.com, purchased the remaining stake for $1.8 billion. After the acquisition, the company was valued at $2.5 billion and the domain name at $872 million.
Longest domain name
The longest domain name is 63 characters long and if you add the 4 characters of the dot-com suffix, the number becomes 67!
In order to get the “world record” recognised, the owner wrote to Guinness. His request was turned down because Guinness saw “no merit whatsoever” in it. It was like “taking the largest number in the world and then adding 1 to it”, they replied.
Any way, here it is: www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthen
someandthensomemoreandmore.com/
Shortest domain name ever
Many domain names hold the title of being the shortest in the world. For instance, Google’s g.cn was registered by the company to direct users to the Chinese version of their search engine. Another notable example is n.pr which is owned by the National Public Radio (NPR) and spells out the name of the organisation.
The most famous domain name
Sex.com was embroiled in so much of controversy and chicanery that journalist Kieren McCarthy wrote a book on it called sex.com. How many domains can boast of that? So, in our opinion, this is the most famous domain name.
Here is the story in brief. In 1995, Gary Kremen, the founder of Match.com, purchased the domain name from NetworkSolutions. By way of trickery and deceit, Stephen M. Cohen took over the “ownership”. He continually pestered the domain registrar with false documents and finally got through after a phone call and a fax. Once Cohen had the domain name in his hand, he put up a advertising rich web site that earned him close to $500,000 per month.
Kremen sued big time and Cohen was ordered to pay $65 million to the legal owner. Realising he is cornered, Cohen bolted off to Mexico, was finally captured and handed over to the authorities. Kremen got his domain name back.
The first domain name registered by an individual
John Gilmore was the first individual to register a .com domain name, toad.com. This was in 1987. John was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems.
The first country domain names
The US, UK and Israel were the first three countries to have their country code TLDs assigned by the ICANN, “.us”, “.uk” and “.il”, respectively.
EXAMPLE.COM, example.com or Example.Com?
Domain names are case insensitive which means EXAMPLE.COM, example.com or even eXaMpLe.CoM are all the same.
By the way, a domain name may be case-insensitive, a URL is not. Which brings us to the next point.
Isn’t a domain name a URL?
NO! A URL is much more than a domain name.
A URL is a unique location of a file on the Internet while a domain name is, well, just a web site name. (That may be a little too vague but should get the idea across.)
The URL of this page is https://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/10-more-top-facts-about-domain-names. The domain name is simply webdevelopersnotes.com (without the ‘www’ and the ‘https://’).
A URL is made up of various things including a protocol (http), a domain name, folder names, file name etc. So in essence, a domain name can be a part of a URL.
A domain name which is associated with at least one I.P. address is known as hostname. In a way, domain names are just a human readable form of an I.P. address.
Only alphanumeric and the hyphen
At the time of writing, domain names can only contain the English alphabet (a-z), digits (0-9) and the hyphen (-). Additionally, a domain name cannot begin and end with a hyphen.
