Long URLs: do they make sense?

I guess, long domain names don’t make good business sense as they are harder to remember and are more prone to errors when someone types them out on a browser’s address bar. But there sure are some crazy names you can’t even make sense of. Most of them are made for name sake and don’t have much contents so you certainly won’t need to visit them again.

I was thinking if you can make a long name in free blog hosts. It doesn’t make much sense as I can always make a very long subdomain (which precede the primary domain name and are followed by a period) for xnepali.com itself. But these free blog hosts have some restriction in length of subdomain. For example I created a blogspot account can-you-remember-this-long-blog-names and that was the maximum allowed: http://can-you-remember-this-long-blog-names.blogspot.com/

Wordpress.com can host a bit longer names but it does not allow dashes so the names are a bit difficult to read. But this one is pretty long http://worldslongestdomainnameinwordpressdotcomoranywhere.wordpress.com

Regarding standalone domains, there are a lot of them and http://www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com claims to be the world’s longest domain name. But is it? It turns out that this is a matter of definition. According to the domain registrars, the longest legal domain name is 63 characters starting with a letter or number.

If you included subdomains you can get longer, probably up to some limit supported by individual browser software. If you include domain suffixes in your character count you also can get longer (+4 for .com and +6 for .co.uk, for example).

I don’t think either subdomains or suffixes should be included in the search fro the world’s largest domain name, meaning the best you can do is tie for first with 63 characters.

Some other fun long domain names:

http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com – the 3 is a subdomain, I like the photo of Dr. Evil

http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com – a free email service

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com – named after a Welsh Village, claims to be the world’s longest domain name (of course, by my definition, it is at best tied) and in Guinness records as the world’d longest domain name (turns out the title is for world’s longest domain named after a real place) (source)

As expected the contents in these looooooooong sites are not of much interest for you and me. If you are interested in reading more about the domain-names I suggest you to visit this page with some graphs and charts of domain name usage.