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I have never seen a website hosted on a TLD (for example: http://com or http://ru)

Is this even possible?

Alexander Gonchiy
  • 147

3 Answers3

6

It's technically possible, but not recommended. For the new gTLDs, the agreements between the domain holders and ICANN even forbids doing it.

Calle Dybedahl
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6

It is possible to create AAAA and A records on a TLD. There are a few TLDs which already do this and run a webserver on the address. Generally those will simply server a redirect to the website of the registrar for that TLD. One example of this is http://dk./

It would even be possible to create AAAA and A records on ., but that hasn't been done, and it seems unlikely that would ever happen. If it did happen you could even imagine a website on the address http://./.

But lots of software is going to treat such domains differently from how you would want it to. For example software may apply heuristics to decide whether a string is a domain or not by looking for the presence of a . character. Moreover if software does consider a string without a . to be a domain name in the first place, another layer of the software may decide that due to the absence of a . it has to be subject to your DNS search configuration.

Those are the reasons I wrote dk. in the above example rather than just dk. In short it is possible but not very useful. And getting your own TLD is expensive.

kasperd
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5

From a DNS perspective, it's possible for A records to exist at the TLD level. In practice, the registries do not do so.

Instead of appropriating the apex, registries typically reserve a subdomain within their own TLD for administrative use. A common convention is to host this under the nic subdomain (Network Information Center), with nic.uk being an example of such.

Caution: The practice of reserving the nic subdomain is not standardized. One should not assume that such a website is operated by a registry entity, with nic.com being an example of one that is not.

Andrew B
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