7 ms·
Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like?
I couldn't find any kind of traffic report from searching.
- jcr 12y agoThe domain "example.com" is reserved for examples. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6761#section-6.5 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6761#section-6.5
- mkr-hn 12y agoSomething still serves pages and responds to requests. I want to know what the logs look like (in general). I hoped the person who administers it was an HN user.
- jcr 12y ago$ nslookup example.com Server: 10.1.1.1 Address: 10.1.1.1#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: example.com Address: 93.184.216.119 $ whois 93.184.216.119 <snip> % Information related to '93.184.216.0 - 93.184.216.255' % Abuse contact for '93.184.216.0 - 93.184.216.255' is 'abuse@edgecast.com' inetnum: 93.184.216.0 - 93.184.216.255 netname: EDGECAST-NETBLK-03 descr: NETBLK-03-EU-93-184-216-0-24 country: EU admin-c: DS7892-RIPE tech-c: DS7892-RIPE status: ASSIGNED PA mnt-by: MNT-EDGECAST source: RIPE # Filtered person: Derrick Sawyer address: 2850 Ocean Park Blvd., Suite 200, Santa Monica CA 90405 USA phone: +18773343236 nic-hdl: DS7892-RIPE source: RIPE # Filtered mnt-by: MNT-EDGECAST That seems to be the person you'd want to ask.
- mkr-hn 12y agoI had two options: 1: Email them and ask for myself, and only myself. 2: See if I could cajole the admin out into the light for a potentially interesting public discussion.
- jcr 12y agoWell you got my up-vote. ;) The trouble is, the edgecast.com Content Distribution Network (CDN) is owned by Verizon. In theory, the `nslookup example.com` command should fail with NXDOMAIN (Non-eXisting Domain) error, but on some networks like Verizon, the bastards are actually resolving it even though the IETF and IANA specs say it should never resolve at all. For notes, Verizon does transparent redirection of DNS requests on their network so you actually can't use anything other than their DNS servers, but this case is just odd. EDIT: I originally wrote `whois` rather than `nslookup` --heck, whois doesn't have that error code. It's early/late, and it seems hn user "vertex-four" below is right about the "example.com" domain always being registered to IANA, but as far as I remember, it should never resolve to an IP address. Need sleep.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- vertex-four 12y ago> In theory, the `whois example.com` command should fail with NXDOMAIN (Non-eXisting Domain) error Huh? No, it shouldn't. Example domains are, according to the RFC, permanently registered to IANA, although not through the "normal channels" (I suppose they don't have to pay for them). example.com and other example domains resolve correctly wherever you are. They are not treated specially in any way (or shouldn't be, according to the RFC) aside from that they're permanently registered to IANA and that application developers should understand that they're example domains. The RFC does not prevent IANA from running any services on example domains, and they choose to run an HTTP server.
- jcr 12y agoYou're right about the "example.com" and similar domains always being registered to IANA, and I even did a brain-fade on whois/nslookup in my comment, but as far as I remember, the example domains are never supposed to resolve to an IP? I'll look at this again after I get some sleep.
- 12y ago
- jaxbot 12y agoBased on what the other comments suggest, does the page look the same to everyone? Here's what it looks like for me: https://gist.github.com/jaxbot/a11d55ddaa12901162e5 https://gist.github.com/jaxbot/a11d55ddaa12901162e5
- vertex-four 12y agoLooks exactly like that to me.
- ejr 12y agoSame here on multiple browsers. In case you're interested in what it's running : http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://example.com http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://example.c...
- chippy 12y agoArchive.org has copies of this from 2002 with some variation over time https://web.archive.org/web/20020120142510/http://example.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020120142510/http://example.co...
- AzioMurad 12y agoIt's pretty high according to Alexa: Global Rank: 9,789 / United States: 9,622 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/example.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/example.com
- sutterbomb 12y ago~2M visits a month, 60% direct and 30% referral. http://www.similarweb.com/website/example.com http://www.similarweb.com/website/example.com
- joosters 12y agoThe https://example.com/ https://example.com/ site has a certificate valid for many interesting domains. Unfortunately, none of them are example.com. I guess it's because of the Edgecast CDN?
- jakub_g 12y agoW3.org used to have up to 130M (!) requests per day for HTML DTDs [1], probably mostly from poorly written spiders traversing all the links they managed to find the crawled HTML pages, or clients validating schemas without any caching of DTDs. Would be indeed interesting to get reliable info about how example.com looks in comparison. [1] http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic/ http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dt...
- IgorPartola 12y agoDon't @example.com email addresses get a ton of mail as well?
- duskwuff 12y agoThe domain doesn't publish a MX record, and the A record fallback isn't accepting connections on port 25. So no; while there's probably a lot of it that people try to send, none of it arrives.
- ScrewYouGuys 12y agoIf they had an MX record, this would be really interesting to see. I'm sure I've seen plenty of signup forms with placeholder text such as: user@example.com
- kngspook 12y agoI routinely put <whatever I feel like that day>@example.com email addresses in for sites that are braindead when it comes to data requirements. Hell, I've even given human beings <my name>@example.com in conversation when they demanded an email address. And they accepted it.
- heyalexej 12y agoBacklinks[1],[2],[3] and rankings[4] might be interesting to some people as well. [1]https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/?target=example.com https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/?target... [2]http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer?q=example.com&oq=example.com&IndexDataSource=F http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer?q=example.c... [3]http://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=example.com http://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=example.com [4]http://www.semrush.com/info/example.com+(by+organic) http://www.semrush.com/info/example.com+(by+organic)
- joelrunyon 12y ago6.8M backlinks - woah.
- leephillips 12y agoWell, most of those are low-quality links. That must explain why I never see example.com come up in my Google searches.
- heyalexej 12y agoThere's no content that could be ranked. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aexample.com https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aexample.com
- joelrunyon 12y agoThis.
- inthewoods 12y agoCompete.com has them at 155k a month. Now, having worked at Compete in the past, I usually found their traffic estimate to be off by 75-100% due to the lack of international data (and coordinating with publishers/looking at their Google Analytics data). Compete also can't capture mobile usage which could account for up to 50% of a domain like this. So I'd estimate it at 600k/month. 150k x 2 = 300k, and then 50% coming from mobile that isn't measures = 600k. Just a data point....Similarweb estimate could be better.
- __float 12y agoThis would make sense for a website that actually has content people want. Traffic to example.com surely wouldn't be intentional or repeated, and certainly not the result of an end user typing "example.com" into the address bar.
- inthewoods 12y agoWhy? Why wouldn't people type in example.com?
- rlongstaff 12y agoIt would be interesting to see how much traffic localhost.com gets too :)
- gizmo686 12y agoNot an answer, but I just checked localhost.com to see what is there. 302 redirect to google.
- kngspook 12y agoApparently it's actually owned by Google..? IP Address 74.125.224.72 - 131 other sites hosted on this server IP Location United States - California - Mountain View - Google Inc. ASN United States AS15169 GOOGLE - Google Inc.,US (registered Mar 30, 2000)