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Domain Names

A Beginner's Guide to Domain Hacks

Jan 03 2007

A Beginner's Guide to Domain Hacks

Wednesday, 03 January 2007

Over the last few years the domain business has profesionalized rapidly with big corporations forming, each controlling thousands of domains. Companies like iREIT and Moniker have led the way using large statistical packages to analyze every feature of a domain and its value.

However, there's one aspect of the domain world where the only limit is your imagination (oh, and your willingness to deal with obscure government organizations in tiny islands and countries).

Domain hacks are basically puns. The simplest way to describe them is that they are domain names that actually use the extension as part of the word.

So for example, Blogs.com is a traditional domain name that might cost you millions of dollars, but Blo.gs is a domain hack available for a much cheaper price. All you need to do to get a .gs domain is to hunt down the registry for the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

The most famous domain hack of all is del.icio.us which utilizes the .us code for the United States.

We've compiled a list of the most popular endings used to create domain hacks, but I'm sure that after browsing through the complete list of endings at Wikipedia, you'll be able to dream up many more. The cost of registering obscure domains can vary from a few dollars per year to several thousand, but we find the best place to search for most of these is DomainSite.com.

TLDs and their Restrictions

	Domain Hacks [-]
.ai	Anguilla. Used for cities such as Mumb.ai, Dub.ai and Shangh.ai.
.am	Armenia. Use for radio stations on the AM dial and for words ending in "am" such as pr.am.
.as	American Samoa. Useful for words ending in .as such as Mam.as and Pap.as.
.at	Austria. Used for domain hacks such as injuries.at/work, injuries.at/home, plus phrases ending in .at such as losef.at.
.be	Belgium. Used for words such as tu.be.
.bz	Belize. Used as an alternative or typo for .biz.
.cc	Cocos Islands. Used to mean Credit Card.
.co.ck	Cook Islands. No more said.
.de	Germany. The worlds most popular country code. Used for hacks in Spanish as "de" means "of".
.ec	Ecuador. I've seen this used for Queb.ec.
.es	Spain. Used for English plural words, such as potato.es.
.fm	Federated States of Micronesia. Used for many radio stations on the FM dial.
.gs	South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands. Used for names such as blo.gs and rankin.gs.
.im	Isle of Man. Used as "I am".
.io	British Indian Ocean Territory. Useful for br.io and more.
.in	India. Used to mean "Internet", Indiana and for hacks such as shopping.in/Ireland, shopping.in/Australia. English words possible include doma.in, plus phrases such as log.in and finally, many French words end with .in, so hacks such as jard.in are possible.
.it	Italy. Useful for all phrases ending in "it".
.is	Iceland. Useful for phrases ending in "is" such as who.is.
.la	Designed for Laos. Used for Los Angeles and for words ending in la, such as grano.la.
.ms	Montserrat. Used for bedroo.ms and more.
.md	Moldova. Used for doctors and people in Maryland.
.net	A global TLD. Used for words such as inter.net and pla.net.
.nu	Isle of Niue. It can stand for "new" and means "now" in Scandanavian languages. In French, it is used for porn sites as it means "naked".
.sc	Seychelles. Used to mean "source".
.sh	Saint Helena. Used for Shanghai and for words such as hu.sh.
.sr	Suriname. Used to mean "seniors".
.st	Sao Tome and Principe. Used for "Street" (ie. Main.St) and also for words ending in .st, such as li.st.
.to	Tonga. Used for phrases ending in .to such as Go.to.
.tv	Tuvalu. Used to mean "television".
.us	United States. Home to the most famous domain hack of all, del.icio.us, plus lots of domains such as call.us, email.us.
.vc	Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Used to mean "Venture Capital".
.ws	Western Samoa. Used to mean "website".