Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like?

68 pointsby mkr-hnvor 12 Jahren32 comments

I couldn't find any kind of traffic report from searching.

33 comments

jakub_gvor 12 Jahren

W3.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_dt...

heyalexejvor 12 Jahren

Backlinks[1],[2],[3] and rankings[4] might be interesting to some people as well.

[1]https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/?target... [2]http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer?q=example.c... [3]http://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=example.com [4]http://www.semrush.com/info/example.com+(by+organic)

joelrunyonvor 12 Jahren

6.8M backlinks - woah.

leephillipsvor 12 Jahren

Well, most of those are low-quality links. That must explain why I never see example.com come up in my Google searches.

heyalexejvor 12 Jahren

There's no content that could be ranked. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aexample.com

joelrunyonvor 12 Jahren

This.

jcrvor 12 Jahren

The domain "example.com" is reserved for examples.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6761#section-6.5

mkr-hnvor 12 Jahren

Something 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.

jcrvor 12 Jahren

$ 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 '[email protected]'

  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-hnvor 12 Jahren

I 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.

jcrvor 12 Jahren

Well 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.

vertex-fourvor 12 Jahren

> 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.

jcrvor 12 Jahren

You'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.

gpvosvor 12 Jahren

They used not to resolve in the far past. Apparently they decided otherwise later.

[deleted]vor 12 Jahren

MattyMcvor 12 Jahren

Do it! I would love to know the answer to this as well. I bet there's a great story here.

inthewoodsvor 12 Jahren

Compete.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.

__floatvor 12 Jahren

This 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.

inthewoodsvor 12 Jahren

Why? Why wouldn't people type in example.com?

sutterbombvor 12 Jahren

~2M visits a month, 60% direct and 30% referral. http://www.similarweb.com/website/example.com

chippyvor 12 Jahren

Archive.org has copies of this from 2002 with some variation over time https://web.archive.org/web/20020120142510/http://example.co...

jaxbotvor 12 Jahren

Based 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

ejrvor 12 Jahren

Same here on multiple browsers. In case you're interested in what it's running : http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://example.c...

vertex-fourvor 12 Jahren

Looks exactly like that to me.

joostersvor 12 Jahren

The 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?

AzioMuradvor 12 Jahren

It's pretty high according to Alexa:

Global Rank: 9,789 / United States: 9,622

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/example.com

IgorPartolavor 12 Jahren

Don't @example.com email addresses get a ton of mail as well?

duskwuffvor 12 Jahren

The 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.

kngspookvor 12 Jahren

I 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.

ScrewYouGuysvor 12 Jahren

If 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: [email protected]

rlongstaffvor 12 Jahren

It would be interesting to see how much traffic localhost.com gets too :)

gizmo686vor 12 Jahren

Not an answer, but I just checked localhost.com to see what is there. 302 redirect to google.

kngspookvor 12 Jahren

Apparently 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)