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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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: user@example.com
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)
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...