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.