Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog

About me

Subscribe via RSS

Follow @joskirps on Twitter

Find me on Facebook

Do you know example.com?

December 13, 2007

You surely have already seen it in online documentations and installation guidelines: example.com is probably one of the most often mentioned sites on the web. The company who owns that domain should make millions with ads alone. But have you ever tried to enter this domain in your web browser?

Well, example.com does really exists, but it isn't owned by a company. Just as example.net and example.org, it has been officially reserved for use in documentations, as described in RFC 2606, Section 3. The domains belong to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and are not available for registration and they will never expire.

The IANA is the entity that oversees global IP address allocation, DNS root zone management, and other Internet protocol assignments. It is operated by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which is itself a California non-profit corporation.

The fact that these domains are reserved makes sure that documentation writers can be sure to pick a domain that won’t inconvenience anyone if end-users try to use the sample configurations or examples as-is. The domains are redirected to IP 208.77.188.166 which currently displays the following message:

You have reached this web page by typing "example.com", "example.net", or "example.org" into your web browser. These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3.

What's next?

	Save this page
	Digg it
	Stumble it
	Send via e-mail
	Open permalink

Share this!

4 Comments - Read comments - Leave a comment

Erika said on December 13, 2007:

guess this means they are doing that protection thing for www.sitename.com cool post!

Buy My Hosue said on May 20, 2008:

wow, pretty cool. I always wondered who was in charge of internet domain names. It seems you can buy them anywere and people even auction them. I just didn't know there was a central non-profit company that managed all of them. Thanks for the info.

agustin said on September 22, 2009:

i was loging in but it said 500 internal sever error on the page i tryed two log in a few times could not remmber my password had two reset password then that when it said 500 internal sever error

example.com.ru said on June 9, 2010:

Great article, very informative. Thanks and greetings!

	Jos Kirps

	About
	About me Blog Contact Important Stuff
	Books
	Some of my all time favourite books...: