How is such a web address possible?
The registered domain is “www.com”, just like “straightdope.com”.
The preceeding bit, a “subdomain” (usually “www” but can be anything at all, such as “boards”), is optional, so can be omitted.
So normally you’d see www.[domain name].com, or in the example, www.www.com. However, in this case they’ve omitted the subdomain, and because you’re used to seeing “www” as a subdomain, it looks weird.
Here is an article on how DNS works.
Basically, back in 1998, Original Web Ventures Inc. (or some previous owner) bought the domain name www.com, just as the Reader bought the name straightdope.com.
Not every website has to have www in the domain address.
Google, for instance, uses www, www2 and www3 as prefixes. Here’s the difference between them explained:
It goes on to give a tool for comparing results from the sites, but that’s only of interest, I should have thought, to webmasters.
Yes.
Often, you have www.whatever.com for the World Wide Web (WWW) server, ftp.whatever.com for the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, or smtp.whatever.com for the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mail server, and so on. Sometimes you’ll also get subdomains named according to function, for instance boards.straightdope.com for these message boards, or secure.whatever.com for a company’s secure login area.
But if there’s only one server, and it’s serving up World Wide Web pages, it will usually be called www. These tend to outnumber servers with other names these days.
Often, the bare second-level domain will point to the web server as well: requesting www.whatever.com and just whatever.com will yield the same thing. I notice that www.com does not do this: www.www.com does not work.
Trivia: The World Wide Web in Esperanto is the “Tut-Tera Teksaĵo”. So Esperanto-language web servers are sometimes named ttt. But even then, they’ll have a www name as well.
I’ve been looking up .coms that available because im going to buy one.
and all versions like
www.wwwdotcom.com
www.com.com
are all taken!
I have a suspicion that every word in the English language is taken as a .com subdomain.
Maybe you could make something up, or try French?
I pulled down my dictionary, opened it at random, and typed in the first word I saw. hemp.com is taken; it resolves to everything.hemp.com. Pacific.com is tennis racquets. Bookmark.com is a porn site. Helpless.com, fadeless.com, cotinga.com, lysergicaciddiethylamide.com, marrow.com, and superhet.com all go to curiously-generic pages with generic graphics and generic link lists. I think they’re owned by namesquatters and are for sale.
Hey Sunspace some sits might come up with something BUT are available for sale. trying search for what available on something like namecheap.com
Or goto Whois.sc
Not only will they tell you is it is available they will tell you who owns it their address and phone numbers when it was originally registered and when it expires its page rank and all sorts of other interesting info. If you stumble around on their site you will discover some cool features as well. Some you have to pay for but other are free.
Nameceap is great place to register domain names. I have about 30+ with them.
Thats called wildcard domain redirection. Your ISP/DNS provider has set up a system that redirects unresolved queries to a search page (in return for advertising revenue). It’s ok if it only works with http (ie, via a (possibly transparent) web proxy at the ISP). When pure DNS queries resolve wildcards, some software will break - the software expects nonexistant DNS names to fail DNS queries, not resolve to a wildcard. There have been lawsuits about this issue in the past. The search pages provide tracking for unregistered domains so that price can be set based on demand/traffic. Also note that if you do a whois to identify a possible domain name, the domain may be automatically registered to someone else, so that you actually have to buy it off them at an inflated price.
Si