With the announcement today of the sale of z.com for $6.8 million, many have questions about 1character domains. They are obviously valuable domain names so how did we get here ?
There is actually a wikipedia page dedicated to this, On December 1, 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved the remaining single-letter and single-digit domain names. The few domains that were already assigned were grandfathered in and continued to exist.
Let’s take a look at the existing 1 letter names out in the wild:
The first one is the only one with ties to the domainer community. Thunayan K. Al-Ghanim and his Future Media Architects owns i.net. The website has not been updated for awhile, “I.NET is a registrar that manages the domain inventory of Future Media Architects, Inc.” FMA does not have most of its names registered there any longer. The original registrant was INet Solutions Ltd.
Century Link is the owner of Q.com and it just acts as a holding page.
Q Networks owns Q.net but the domain does not resolve.
X.com war originally registered by Weinstein & DePaolis it later became the company we would come to know as Paypal. Paypal is still the registrant of the domain.
X.org was orignally owned by The Open Group who now runs on opengroup.org, according to Wikipedia: The Open Group is a vendor and technology-neutral industry consortium, currently with over four hundred member organizations.[1] It was formed in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation. Services provided include strategy, management, innovation and research, standards, certification, and test development. The domain is now owned by X.Org Foundation.
Z.com of course is in the news today as Nissan has sold the domain to GMO Internet for $6.8 million. Nissan was apparently not the original registrant, that was homepage.com according to Wikipedia.
W.org was acquired under project 94 by WordPress. You may remember this name going unsold with a starting price of $50,000 when Go Daddy held their special project 94 auctions. WordPress acquired the domain in 2014.
WP Tavern covered the acquisition details:
The Purpose Of W.org
I confirmed with a source inside of GoDaddy that they are the ones who provided Matt the domain. Details concerning the transaction are private and the WHOIS information shows no affiliation with Matt.
W.org currently redirects to WordPress.org but is also used to host images and other static assets. I got in touch with Otto to see what the domain and sub-domains are being used for.
- s.w.org is where we’re serving static resources for the main website from. Things like images and CSS files and other such things that don’t go through PHP processes. If you examine the source of most any page on WordPress.org, you’ll see it uses s.w.org for a lot (not all, yet) of the static files displayed.
- ps.w.org is for the plugin repository. We can use it for screenshots and the header banners and other images from the plugin system.
- ts.w.org is for the theme repository. Same deal, for theme screenshots and the like.
If you are interest in a 1 Character .org apply here
Joseph Peterson says
Nice article and perfect timing.
Who’s got his finger on the pulse? RH does.
Domo says
I never read this before, saw it on Twitter.
Really cool, i.net is sweeeet