Domaining Guide

Domain hack

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A domain hack is an unconventional domain name that combines domain labels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full "name" or title of the domain, making a kind of pun.

For example the second-level domain (SLD) blo.gs makes use of the TLD .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) to spell "blogs". The third-level domains del.icio.us and cr.yp.to make use of the SLDs icio.us and yp.to from the TLDs .us (United States) and .to (Tonga) to spell "delicious" and "crypto" respectively.

In this context, the "hack" represents a clever trick (as in programming), not an exploit or break-in (as in security).

Shorter domain names

Domain hacks offer the ability to produce extremely short domain names. A popular real world example is blo.gs with five letters total, versus the comparable blogs.com with eight letters or the often preferred www.blogs.com with eleven letters. Domain hacks default to the omission of the www. prefix, with the side effect of shortening the domain name, as every letter is taken into account as the site's title.

History

On Monday, November 23, 1992, inter.net was registered [1]. On Friday, May 3, 2002, icio.us was registered to create del.icio.us, the most visited domain hack, with the prepending of the "del" third-level domain.

Yahoo! acquired blo.gs[2] on June 14, 2005, and del.icio.us[3] on December 9, 2005.

Who.is is a whois server, indicating the registered ownership information of a domain. It was established June 12, 2002 and registered to an address in Reykjav