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Comment by ShorsHammer | Hacker News Reader

Completely Offtopic: How does one get a single letter domain name?

Especially with a premium tld, and even moreso for a personal blog it just seems unreal.

I guess like any other second-level domainname: Fetch your piggy bank, and then go out to look for it. Peculiar things that pop in my mind right now:

- given their length, know that they are scarce; you can expect that scarcity to drive the price

- some TLDs might have a minimum length for subdomains that are available to the public

- expect a lot of them already registered since longtime, or reserved by various individuals or organizations [0]; intuitively, the chance of those getting released soon feels slim

You can use DNS (check the dig [1] utility), in combination with WHOIS if you want to gather information. Or a website of a domain registrar like [2]. Keep in mind that you might be watched doing that, information that could be used to drive up the price again.

Or, if you really have good ideas, you convince one of the current registrants to use his domain (guessing here that a lot of those domains are not really in use).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dig_(command)

[2] https://shop.gandi.net/en/domain/suggest?search=b.xyz

Anguilla permits them. I had to buy off a squatter.

But Sai is literally my full name (I'm mononymous), at the time it was affordable to buy off the squatter, and the per year registration fee isn't too high. So I think it's certainly been worth it.

That's really cool! Both being mononymous and having a one letter domain. Conlangs are also really cool! You are a pretty cool person!

D'aww. /blush

That's awesome, saw in the bio that it was actually your name too which was even cooler. I spent some time going through {X}.ai domains, surprised many are actually on sale.

Find it impressive because I always feel as though I missed out on the golden era of short domains long ago and that's clearly not the case.

Hopefully you hold onto that mate, it seems like a good patch of digital land :)

Really enjoyed reading through your other stuff too. It's great to see personal sites not so focused on one thing only.

Thanks! People are complex. It's my personal site, not a topical one, so it likewise has on it basically whatever I think would be interesting to put up. ;)

I'd welcome any feedback you have on the rest. Feel free to contact me directly.

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