Answers to your questions about domain names.
- What characters can domain names contain?
- How long can domain names be?
- Why is a domain name important?
- What is a top level domain?
- What country codes are available?
- How many domain names are currently active?
What characters can domain names contain?
Domain name can contain only letters, numbers and hyphens ‘ - ‘. Other special characters like underscores ‘ _ ‘ or exclamation marks ‘!’ are not allowed.
Examples
- wisemans website tips.com (not allowed, contains spaces)
- wisemans_website_tips.com (not allowed, contains underscore)
- wiseman’swebsitetips.com (not allowed, contains apostrophe)
- allthewikis.com (allowed)
- your-own-name.com (allowed)
How long can domain names be?
Domain names can be up to 64 characters long. This means you have lots of choices when choosing domain names.
This-is-the-best-web-site-4-cat-lovers.com still leaves you plenty of characters to spare. However less than 1% of domain names are more than 25 characters long.
The number count includes the characters used to identify the Top Level Domain (for example .com, .net, or .org) but not the www. before the name.
Why is a domain name important?
A domain name is your address on the internet. Like any address it says a lot about you and can make you hard or easy to find. When you are getting domain names choose carefully.
What is a top level domain?
The top level domain (TLD) refers to the three characters after the dot such as .com and .org. Different top level domains are assigned for different classes of website. Here is a list of the current Top Level Domains.
What country codes are available?
You can visit IANA for a complete list of current country codes.
How many domain names are currently active?
This table indicates the growth in active domain names over the last three years.
| Total | com | net | org | biz | info | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 2007 | 85,992,045 | 64,390,262 | 9,057,455 | 5,729,316 | 1,616,421 | 4,002,043 |
| Mar 2006 | 65,408,355 | 49,733,538 | 7,306,957 | 4,430,426 | 1,336,117 | 2,593,693 |
| Mar 2005 | 48,618,828 | 35,131,344 | 5,528,323 | 3,430,344 | 1,116,718 | 3,404,590 |
For information on what has happened over the last 24 hours visit Domain Tools. You can see that just under 40,000 domain names expire in a day.
Tagged with: Domains • FAQs
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