What about this special domain "to."

Question

Today I saw this special domain and I'm really wondering.

http://to./

How it's possible. Where can I register this type of domains :)

Thank you.

Answer 1

In theory, any fully qualified domain name is supposed to end with a . - this is in the original RFC but ignored for practical reasons. You could also set a server to point at a TLD, but this isn't typically done.

So to do this, you'd need to own your own TLD - Its plausible but unlikely - icann lets organisations run such TLDs but you'd need to prove that you are capable of running a registar, and some other requirements. "I want a cool 2 letter tld" is not a good reason . Alternately you'd need a ccTLD, and control the root of that, either by being the official registar, or perhaps by overthrowing the current government without causing international incidents.

So, a two letter domain at a dot at the end is plausible but its unlikely an individual can have it.

However feel free to end your own domain with a dot, and amuse and astound your friends.

Answer 2

Some detective work about http://to./ (or http://to) :

• The Online Url-IP Converter converts it to the IP address of 216.74.32.107, and so does ping to. on my computer. For verification, entering http://216.74.32.107/ in the browser shows the same website.
• The IP address 216.74.32.107 is mapped by MYIP.MS to the USA company Wcp/32Points Intermediate Holding Company, INC, with this information :

• This company hosts 584 sites (via DNS), divided among 21 top-level domains. Their list is given in the above MYIP.MS link. This means that each of the 21 domains of format like abc.com has about 28 sub-domains like xxx.abc.com, meaning 21 quite complex websites.

• ARIN Whois says this company owns the IP range of 216.74.0.0 - 216.74.63.255, which is a modest chunk of 16320 addresses.

• The company website is given as www.breedworks.biz but there is nothing at this address (domain for sale).

Conclusion : This is a small hosting company which probably manages its own DNS records.

My very private opinion :

This is not a domain, but a glitch in the DNS records of a hosting company. In other words - a bug that has gone unobserved, until the poster happened (probably) to mistype an HTTP address.

This DNS seems to point to an empty website using IIS, probably never used and so this DNS error was never discovered.

I have not found any way of informing this company of their DNS error, except perhaps by letter or phone call (which I have no intention of doing).

Answer 3

To is the country code for Tonga. The United States has a country code of us, so you may see domain names in the form example.us. The country code for Germany is de, the one for Mexico is mx, and the one for France is fr. For others, see Officially assigned code elements.

Some country codes are used for web sites outside the country with which the domain name is associated. E.g. .ws, which is an abbreviation for "Western Samoa" and is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Samoa, is attractive to some website owners because it can also be thought of as an abbreviation for "web site".

Answer 4

I think to./ is really just a webserver installed on the host system which is providing the .to tld's can be proved by going to http://to

The / at the end is just the subfolder navigation delimeter and the . second last stands for the root level domain construct which is the tld of all tld's which all browsers don't need to be entered but actually exists.

In case it is not clear what i mean here is an example:

a normal url as it is used/entered by people

www.goolge.com

what the url actually is

www.google.com.

or with other words you can add a ./ at the end of every fqdn and it should work like bevor

prove it by opening http://www.google.com./

Answer 5

There are probably vendors that resell it but you can register it at https://register.to/

Update:

After seeing many comments, I furthered my verification and found that all TLDs can have a DNS entry pointing to back to themselves, which explains that http://to is a valid URL.

If getting such a short URL is really what you're looking for, you would need to setup a TLD and this is well addressed in this question.

Answer 6

I don't know if you will be allowed to buy the top domain "to" which is accessible as host name to a web page more or less by chance, by ending it with a dot. I don't think it's a good idea either because such an address will make unpredictable results depending on what software you're using. This is because top domains are not defined as dns lookup for services, thus it's all in the implementation of a certain program how it will be interpreted. If you want contact with people behind the /to dot/ joke you will find information here: http://ipduh.com/dns/?to.