I need to know this because I’m thinking of naming my Cecil Adams tribute page: www dot Cecil Adams is the most awesome journalist to ever pick up a pen so dont even try to imitate him you talentless hack.com (only without the spaces and a real . instead of the word “dot”).
http://www.melbourneit.com.au/help/index.php?questionid=606
128 characters.
Sorry, I think I’m misreading that page. Other sites say 63 is the max, including the extension.
It appears to be 67, including the domain extension. Sixty-three is the limit for the bit before the suffix. Examples:
http://www.thepersonwithanewideaisacrank-untiltheideasucceeds-by-marktwain.com
And the ever-popular:
http://www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com
Starting after the “www.” and including the “.com” at the end, they each have 67.
Just for the record, the “www.” is not part of the domain name, although you didn’t count that so that’s OK. I used to work for a MAJOR registry/registrar (well, that should tell you right there) and I remember when we modified the system to take the longer names (it used to be something like 26, can’t remember for sure) and there was all this discussion about should we assume that the TLD would always have a max length of 3.