Domain hack

A domain hack is a word or phrase spelled by a fully concatenating two or more adjacent levels of a domain name, for example moji.to, unlock.me or del.icio.us. By including the entire domain namespace when searching for domains, many possibilities exist for new domain hacks going forward.

In this context, the word hack denotes a clever trick (as in computer programming), not an exploit or break-in. Domain hacks offer the ability to produce short and meaningful domain names like DNPric.es. This makes them potentially valuable as redirectors, pastebins, base domains from which to delegate subdomains, URL shortening and other clever services.

History

On November 23, 1992, inter.net was registered. In the 1990s, several hostnames ending in pla.net were active. The concept of spelling out a phrase with the parts of a hostname to form a domain hack became well established. On Friday, May 3, 2002, icio.us was registered to create del.icio.us. Delicious would later gain control of the delicio.us domain, which had been parked since April 24, 2002, the day the .us ccTLD was opened to second-level registrations.

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 Reykjavík, Iceland.

On January 14, 2004, the Christmas Island Internet Administration revoked .cx domain registration for shock site goatse.cx, a domain which used se.cx to form the word "sex". The domain was originally registered in 1999. Similar names had been used for parody sites such as oralse.cx or analse.cx. In some cases, .cz (Czech Republic) or .kz (Kazakhstan) are substituted for .cx.

The term domain hack was coined by Matthew Doucette on November 3, 2004 to mean "an unconventional domain name that uses parts other than the SLD (second level domain) or third level domain to create the title of the domain name."

Yahoo! acquired blo.gs on December 9, 2005.

On 11 September 2007, root name servers for .me were delegated by IANA to the Government of Montenegro, with a two-year transition period for existing .yu names to be transferred to .me. One of the first steps taken in deploying .me online was to create .its.me as a domain space for personal sites. Many potential domain hacks, such as love.me and balance.me, were held back by the registry as premium names for later auction. One .me domain hack example is please.do.not.disturb.me.

On December 15, 2009 Google launched its own URL shortener under the domain goo.gl using the ccTLD of Greenland. YouTube subsequently launched youtu.be using the ccTLD of Belgium. In 2015 Google used the domain hack abc.xyz for their newly launched Alphabet Inc.

In March 2010, National Public Radio launched its own URL shortener under the domain n.pr using the ccTLD of Puerto Rico. The n.pr domain is currently used to link to an NPR story page by its ID and is one of the shortest possible domain hacks.

In late 2010, Apple launched a URL shortener at the domain itun.es, using the ccTLD of Spain, in a similar move to Google's goo.gl. Unlike goo.gl, which is public and can be used for any web address, itun.es is used only for iTunes Ping URL shortening.

Spotify also use the URL shortener spoti.fi to link to artist, partners, playlists, albums and songs.

International names

In most cases, registration of these short domain names relies on the use of ccTLDs, each of which has a unique two-letter identifier.

For example, blo.gs makes use of the TLD .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) to spell "blogs", fa.st makes use of the TLD .st (São Tomé and Príncipe) to spell "fast", psycholo.gy uses the TLD .gy (Guyana) to spell "psychology", Instagr.am makes use of the TLD .am (Armenia) to spell the name of photo-sharing service "Instagram", helpmelearn.it makes use of the TLD .it (Italy) to spell "help me learn it", and darkvir.us uses TLD .us (United States) and sharing it for subdomains with free hosting, and brief.ly uses the TLD .ly (Libya) to spell "briefly" (a popular fat URL bundler).

The third-level domains del.icio.us, cr.yp.to and e.xplo.it make use of the SLDs icio.us, yp.to and xplo.it from the TLDs .us (United States), .to (Tonga) and .it (Italy) to spell "delicious", "crypto" and "exploit" respectively.

In some cases, an entire country code domains have been re-purposed in its international marketing, such as .am (Armenia), .fm (Federated States of Micronesia), .cd (Democratic Republic of the Congo), .dj (Djibouti), and .tv (Tuvalu) for sites delivering various forms of audiovisual content.

.ly (Libya) has been used for English words that end with suffix "ly", such as sincere.ly. Popular URL shortening services bit.ly, brief.ly, name.ly and ow.ly use this hack.

The link shortening service gadaf.fi was created as a reaction to Libyan registry suspending an adult oriented .ly link shortener vb.ly.

Other languages

In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland the domain .ag for Antigua and Barbuda is used by corporations in the legal form of Aktiengesellschaft (commonly abbreviated as AG).

The American Samoa domain .as is popular in the handful of countries where A/S is the legal suffix for corporations.

Some organisations situated in Switzerland use TLDs to specifically refer to their Cantons (like the Belgian TLD .be for the Canton of Berne).

In Turkish language, ".biz" means "we", and can be used for emphasis at the end of "we are" sentences.

Family names in many Slavic languages written in internationalized variant end with ch (i.e. -ich, -vich, -vych, -ovich). This ch comes from Slavic "ć", "č", "ч", or "ћ". Therefore, the Swiss .ch ccTLD is an option. Another use case of .ch is for English words that end in ch, e.g. tech, punch, search, crunch, rich. Examples of such domains are codesear.ch, dncat.ch, and swit.ch.

Since the introduction of .eu domains (eu meaning "I" in Romanian, Galician and Portuguese), these domains have become popular in Romania, with people registering their names with the .eu extension.

In French, Italian and Portuguese languages, « là » or « lá » mean "there". As the .la domain (Laos) is available for second-level registration worldwide, this can be an easy way to get a short, catchy name like "go there". In Italy some TLDs are identical to Italian Provinces' identifier, such as .to (Turin) or .tv (Treviso) and are thus extensively used for web domains in the area. The Canadian domain .ca is also trivial to use as « cá » or « cà » ("here"), respectively in Portuguese and Neapolitan language, or « ça » ("that"), in Canadian French. It is also used by geo hacks like that of mallor.ca.

Hungarian domains sometimes use the Moroccan top level domain .ma (meaning "today"). The Moldovan domain, .md, is used by doctors and medical companies, such as doctors.md, after a legal fight to allow such usage outside of Moldova.

A fad amongst French-speakers was to register their names in the Niue TLD .nu, which in French and Portuguese languages means "nude" or "naked"; however, As of 2007, Niue authorities have revoked many of these domain names. The handful that remain are joke domains without actual nudity. French speakers often use the Jersey TLD .je, since "je" means "I" in French. In addition, .je is used in the Netherlands, as it can mean both "you" or "your", and "small", since the addition of -je to most nouns produces a colloquial diminutive for (e.g. huis.je, or the defunct iPhone app feest.je (feestje meaning "party").

Likewise, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish speakers sometimes use .nu, because it means "now" in these languages. The TLD is still used by many Swedish sites, as prior to 2003 it was impossible for individuals (and difficult for organizations) to register arbitrary domains under the .se TLD.

In Russian language, net (as «nyet») means "no", so there are many domains in the format "something.net" (e.g. redaktora.net meaning "no editor"). A similar use of .info (in many languages where the term signifies "information") is to use a negatory term and .info to yield local equivalents to "there is no information".

In Czech, Polish and Slovak languages, to means "it", so there are many domains using Tonga's .to in the format "do-something.to" (e.g., zrobie.to, meaning "I will do it" in Polish or prestahujeme.to meaning "We will move it" as a Slovak moving service). Notably, Czech file sharing service uloz.to was founded in 2007, and its name "ulož to" means "save it".

In Slovenian language, si is a dative form of the reciprocal personal pronoun and a second person form of the verb to be. As .si is a Slovenian ccTLD, domain hacks are abundant. Additionally, the domain is attractive to speakers of Romance languages, because it is a conjunction, pronoun or an affirmative interjection in many. ARNES limits the use of the domain to residents and entities of Slovenia.

In Spanish and Portuguese languages, ar is the ending of the infinitive of many verbs, so hacks with Argentina's TLD .ar are common (e.g. educ.ar, meaning "to educate").

One of the earliest commercial Internet service providers in Finland used the domain sci.fi — a reference to science fiction.

In Latin, many second-declension nouns in the nominative singular case end in the suffix -us, which is echoed in the TLD .us. So it is possible to create Latin-word domain names, such as obscur.us, which resembles the Latin word obscurus, which means dark, obscure, or unknown.

Other variations

Other variations of domain name hacking include symmetrical domain names, for example qnd.pub, which rotated 180 degrees gives exactly the same domain name: qnd·pub.

New TLDs

With the rise of new TLDs, some companies have registered entire TLDs in order to create a hack for their name. Most prominent is .gle, created for Google to be used as goo.gle.

Some recent examples of domain name hacks using the new gTLDs are: chalmers.associates, quick.mba, misdirect.ion.land.