The domain name trivia quiz: for your next lockdown coffee break
Posted 12th May, 2020 by Sarah
6-minute read
tsoHost has been selling domains for the best part of two decades. Some of our reseller and web development customers have hundreds and hundreds of domains with us.
Last week, we launched a new domain name sale – The Big Domain Name Deal offers customers the opportunity to snap up a new .co.uk domain for just £1.99 for the first year or a new .com domain for only £2.99 for the first year.
To celebrate this, we thought we’d create a fun quiz dedicated to domain name facts and trivia.
You’ll find the nine questions immediately below.
Scroll down to find the answers.
Questions
1 - What was the name of the first domain name ever registered?
2 - What was the name of the most expensive domain ever registered?
3 - Who was Mike Mann?
4 - Who invented the domain name system?
5 - Which countries do the following country code TLDs belong to…?
.aq
.ch
.ee
.gg
.za
6 - Which TLD is reported to be most abused by cyber criminals?
7 - To the nearest million, how many domain names are registered?
8 - What year did domain name registration stop being free?
9 - Which famous couple recently became the victim of a domain name cyber-squatter?
Answers
What was the name of the first domain name ever registered?
Symbolics.com.
The domain was purchased by the computer manufacturer Symbolics Inc, from Massachusetts USA, on 15th March 1985.
According to Tech Crunch, the company made Lisp machines – computers that were optimised to run the Lisp programming language.
Today, the symbolics.com domain takes you to The Big Internet Museum – an online collection of permanent and temporary exhibitions dedicated to the history of the Internet.
What was the name of the most expensive domain ever registered?
The answer to this question isn’t actually as black and white as it might seem.
Infographics and articles on The Most Expensive Domain Names Ever Sold will often name-check LasVegas.com as the priciest domain ever sold, suggesting it sold for an eye-watering $90 million.
However, the source of this figure is thought to be a tweet from finance professional George Kirikos that really only speculated that the buyers of LasVegas.com forked out that sum over a period of 35 years.
According to a report in Domain Name Wire, the domain name Carinsurance.com was bought for $49.7 million in 2010, but there’s not a lot of evidence, ie receipts, to back up that claim either.
More recently, it’s been reported that business intelligence company MicroStrategy sold the domain voice.com for $30 million.
Today, the domain voice.com takes you to what the site says is ‘a transparent, rewards-based social network for creating, distributing, and discovering content’.
Who was Mike Mann?
According to multiple reports in the press, Mike Mann was the Delaware-based businessman who bought up 14,962 domains in the space of 24 hours in 2012.
Today, you can find out more about him, his entrepreneurial past, and his current charitable work on his website mikemann.com.
Who invented the domain name system?
Paul Mockapetris is the man credited with inventing the DNS in 1983. The Internet Hall of Fame explains:
“At USC’s Information Sciences Institute, Mockapetris recognized the problems with the early Internet (then ARPAnet)’s system of holding name to address translations in a single table on a single host (HOSTS.TXT). Instead, he proposed a distributed and dynamic naming system, essentially the DNS of today.”
Which countries do the following country code TLDs reserved for…?
.aq – this one is reserved for Antarctica, defined as everything south of latitude 60 degrees south.
.ch – Switzerland is the owner of this country code TLD. The c and the h are derived from the Latin name for the country - Confoederatio Helvetica.
.ee – this one is reserved for Estonia.
.gg – Guernsey is the island that this TLD relates to.
.za – this one is reserved for South Africa.
What are the three most popular TLDs in 2020?
According to Verisign’s quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, .com is the most popular TLD in the world with 145.4 million registrations.
Somewhat bafflingly, .com is followed closely by the country code TLD .tk – the TLD of Tokelau – a territory in New Zealand. It is said to have 21.5 million registrations.
Reports suggest that registrations for this TLD are high because it’s popular amongst phishing scammers.
Which TLD is said to be most abused by cyber criminals?
According to Spamhaus – an international non-profit organization that tracks spam and related cyber threats – the most abused TLD in April 2020 was .buzz, followed closely by .rest, .top, .wang and .tk.
Spamhaus has developed an equation for calculating the ‘badness’ of a domain, which it explains in detail on its website.
The organisation explains that, as of the then past 30 days, 20,500 out of 26,460 .buzz domains scrutinised by Spamhaus’ systems were classified as bad.
What year did domain name registration stop being free?
Prior to 1995, people could register domain names for free. In its article A Brief History of the Domain Name, Mashable explains:
“That all changed when the National Science Foundation awarded tech consulting company Network Solutions the ability to charge for registration. Domain prices began at $100 for a two-year registration.”
Which famous couple recently became the victim of a domain name cyber squatter?
In April 2020, it was reported that the domain name for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's new charitable foundation, Archewell, was hijacked.
Reports explained how the hijacker redirected visitors to the site to the Kanye West music video for Gold Digger.