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Domains: Internet history

At the very beginning of the existence of the Internet, information about all, then still very few, computers connected to the Network was stored in files etc / hosts. These text files were used (and are still used) in translating domain names into the network addresses of nodes. However, literally in 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 the constantly growing information. This is how domains of different levels of hierarchy arose. Gradually, a fan was added to the naming process - they began to put different meanings into the names of the websites and add different meanings to the top-level domains, invent interesting options and combinations. Domains have become a special world. REG.RU , as a registrar, is part of this world. And we have something to tell.



Strictly speaking, it’s wrong to call a domain name. This is slang. A website address on the Internet is a fully qualified domain name (or more precisely, a FQDN, fully qualified domain name), including:



The entire set of domains of different levels and makes up the full domain name - the unique address of the site on the web. These unique addresses are recognized and interpreted by the DNS (Domain Name System) system for obtaining information about domains. In fact, the beauty of your DNS site name is completely indifferent; it needs your clothes, shoes, and motorcycle IP address information to connect to the site. And domain names are designed primarily for easy memorization and identification of the site address. They take part in shaping the image of the company 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 almost any business is hard to survive.

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, on REG.RU you will find many interesting tools for selecting a name in any domain zone. Moreover, with us now when registering a domain, you can get 2 months of hosting for free and an SSL certificate for a year as a gift . The commercial break is over, we continue.

As has repeatedly shown the experience of mankind, everything that has value in terms of impact on memory / psyche / consciousness of a potential consumer, sooner or later becomes the object of war, disputes, frauds, large and not-so-great deals. As a result, a valuable object is overgrown with 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 of the hierarchy is .COM , which has existed since January 1985. At first, it was managed by the US Department of Defense, but the domain was soon transferred to SRI International. Initially, the .COM zone was created for the establishment of addresses of commercial companies. The first domain in this zone was the address 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 the talk of the town because of the so-called dot-com crisis. In world economic practice, it is common to call any business based on the Internet (Internet companies) a dotcom. At the very end of the 90s, dot-com went on an IPO, their market value grew every day. Analysts had expected the NASDAQ index to reach 6000 points thanks to shares of high-tech companies. The dotcom bubble burst quickly enough: gaining strength and increasing the value of shares in about 6 years, numerous Internet companies collapsed and initiated a bankruptcy procedure due to an ineffective business model. The reason lay in the huge amounts of attracted loans spent on advertising and searching for new investors, and not on product development. In March 2000, the NASDAQ collapsed, and then in 2002, found the mark of 1,100 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 drop in dotcoms. Of course, the domain .COM itself has nothing to do with it, but his name has forever entered the history of the economy.

Today, there are 125,620,040 domains in the .COM zone. Incidentally, corporations have used the .COR domain name before the dotcoms.

Some notable stories about the .COM zone


By the way, about the most expensive (not rating, just some names on the ear):


There are a lot of such examples. It is noteworthy that some of these crazy transactions are associated 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 domain conference TRAFFIC Rick Schwartz (Rick Schwartz). He purchased his first domain name LipService.com in December 1995, paying $ 100. Agree, a serious investment. However, a few years later, Rick went on 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 for a website through a search engine, but drive in a remembered domain name into a browser line (do you feel the power of investing in a good domain name?). Well, then it went, went:


Domain .COM has become an integral part of international business, the names in this zone - the object of the most expensive transactions in the history of domain names. Around dot-com focused cybersquatters, hackers and lovers of profit from around the world.

Domain .org

The situation is slightly different with the top-level domain .ORG. It appeared in 1985, together with .COM, and has existed for 30 years. Domain .ORG created for non-profit organizations, charitable foundations, volunteers, cultural and scientific projects. For example, on January 13, 2001, Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) started working there. In domain .org as of 04/04/2016, there are 10 911 485 domain names. 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 is better not to rush to read and see the anniversary timeline infographic - this is really very interesting. Steeper and not tell.

National


Probably, on “Habré” there is not a single person who has not heard about the domain zone. RF, in which there are 878,144 domains. Meanwhile, this is not the only “national faction” of domain names in its native language. ICANN is positioning the creation of domain names in national languages ​​is perhaps 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 e-mail linked to such domains. At the moment, the case has progressed the most for the Arab segment, but there are domains for Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, and other characters.


In addition, domains with an outline in the national language appear already among the new top-level domains of new gTLDs (generic Top-Level Domain). For example, in the Chinese.. (.URL) - 338 008 domains, the Chinese. 商城 (“shopping center”) - 12 782 domains, etc.

But how does the DNS understand them?

It's simple: multilingual domains are transferred to the DNS system in a transformed form. On the client side, conversion from UNICODE to ASCII Compatible Code (ACE - ASCII Compatible Encoding) takes place - strings consisting of UNICODE characters are represented using Latin lowercase letters and numbers. That is, just in the form of those characters that DNS easily perceives and later returns the client's IP address.



This conversion is necessary because not all DNS servers support the processing of domain names in the IDN format. The method of converting sequences of Unicode characters into ACE sequences is called the Punycode algorithm (Punymod for . - xn - p1ai).

Short Facts About National Domains


A national domain is a necessary attribute of a business that wants to grow in each of the regions. The familiar letters at the end of the domain name are subconsciously associated by the user with the home country, easier to remember, their credibility is higher. This means that loyalty to the company owning the site is growing.

Unusual names and new domains


Obviously, during the existence of the Internet, 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 playful names. The New gTLD list includes about 1,000 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 the winners in life, not what you thought), .CLUB. You may come across unexpected or, on the contrary, very expected names: .ONLINE, .XXX, .PARTY, .RED, .SPACE, .LOL, .SEX, .OOO, .COFFEE, and others. Here live geodomains: .MOSCOW, .BERLIN .LONDON. In these zones, thousands of domain names are registered annually, and they all serve the business well.

Here are some more examples from the list of new domain zones in which you can find unusual and appealing names:


Finally, there are several interesting complete domain names (website addresses) that will clearly delight readers:



Here it is, a real six-level domain

In principle, we did not publish vulgar and ambiguous domain names, which everyone has known about for a long time. 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 just as important as the logo, slogan and company name. The name can cause hatred, love, virality, ridicule, which one to choose depends on the commercial goal of the company or private owner. You can improve yourself as you please, remember one thing: whatever you call your site, so it starts.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/282962/

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