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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

I settled on ds.gy after a lot of searching. At the time I was hoping for as short as possible unless you operate a domain (it's one letter off for standard, 2 if you operate a 2 letter TLD like http://ai./) since it maximizes the efficiency of DNS tunneling. I was expecting a lot of similar uses or a log of clever things/url shortners like t.co but what I found was basically every single and most every dual letter domain was being squatted. Made me a little sad until I saw one that matched my initials and decided that was good enough.

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> like http://ai./

Slightly off topic, but it annoys me to no end that verisign doesn't operate a website at http://com./

I feel like people typing that in, then wondering what the heck just happened would be a great source of people understanding DNS more deeply.

out of curiosity, how does that work?

This is surprisingly hard to explain off the cuff. In DNS, zones are separated by dots, and a fully-qualified domain name ends in a dot. The zones exist because there are too many domains for just one server to handle and this way zones can be distributed and managed separately. DNS queries right to left, for “Google.com.” it would look at “.” and query the root servers asking if they know “Google.com.”, they could reply saying ask “.com.” at this IP. Then the .com. servers look up Google.com. and (eventually, there’s one more lookup for a Google server) return its IP address. Google.com. loads in your browser because an A record is returned by a Google name server. “ai.” is an A record returned by the name server for .ai, as registered in the root DNS servers. Similarly, Verisign could register an A record for .com. But they haven’t... um... Google for how DNS works for a more thorough and perhaps animated example.

> The zones exist because there are too many domains for just one server to handle and this way zones can be distributed and managed separately.

Though that's not really true in practice. Com hasn't exploded under the amount of traffic it faces, and merging in the other zones would only be about twice the load.

Com only handles the NS records and glue records for its direct descendants though. If there were no zones below com, its nameservers would melt from the update requests alone.

There's a reasonably large public company that has the name of my initials, so I never had a chance with that one. I do have two friends who were much more forward thinking and managed to get their 3 initial .com domains early enough before they were gobbled up.

I also tried to get my full name, but that was already taken too. He's a performer so it's probably in better hands but that doesn't lessen my disappointment much.

Aren't 3 letter domains worth a fairly insane amount of money? Did they sell them?

No, they both still have them. They're unusual enough that I doubt they'd be worth the kind of money you're thinking.

This is why you need a nice, long, uncommon, misspelled last name.

I originally rejected the thought of a 12-letter vanity domain, but it turns out that whenever I need to give someone my email, I've almost certainly already had to spell my name for them once already.

I got 9z.nz a few years ago. Without spending $$$, it is exceedingly difficult to find a short name. Fortunately, back then, gandi.net had a decent UI and access to many TLDs.

Wow AI. is so cool. Never knew about it.

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