With the brain running in low gear after exploring ideas and concepts with people all day, I decided to do something silly by running through all domains that had port 80 open from a to z in the .com tld namespace. Results are as follows.
- http://www.q.com -> Qwest
- http://www.x.com -> Paypal’s Dev site
- http://www.z.com -> Nissan’s 350z
Interesting that no other domain is actually registered. Now I’m curious as to why the other domains whois records show they are IANA_RESERVED.
In a thread on google answers, someone states that if someone lets a two-letter domain expire it will not be allowed to be re-registered ever again. This makes me wonder that all the people with single letter domains let their domains expire and became reserved? With a little research into wikipedia of single letter second level domains, we learn that these domains were “grandfathered” in.
Such domains are rare, due to the fact that on December 1, 1993, The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority explicitly reserved all single-letter and single-digit second-level domain names in the top-level domains .com, .net, and .org. This was done in case the registries for these domains became overloaded. – wikipedia
Hope you learned something new!