The longest domain name possible
September 12, 2007 – 10:48 pmJust in case you were wondering, thisisofficiallythelongestdomainnamethatyouareallowedtoregister.
Now some people might want to be naysayers and point out that I could have registered it as a .co.uk or even .org.uk domain and it would have been even longer, but those are TLDs and they miss the point.
The longest domain name that can be registered is officially 63 characters. The overall limit for a domain, it’s subdomains and TLDs is 255, which reminds me of the old Final Fantasy games where none of your stats could break 255.
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Growing up playing The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and other games that carried the 255 limit on various things, I always wondered what it was that they had in common that would give them all the same limit. Now I know that it’s because 255 is the maximum value that can possibly be represented as an eight digit binary and therefore stored as one byte (which is eight bits). I’m not sure which I like better; the mysterious, magical barrier that 255 was to me as a kid or the actual scientific explanation of it. Both are cool in their own way.
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