
Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like? - mkr-hn
I couldn&#x27;t find any kind of traffic report from searching.
======
jakub_g
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...](http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic/)

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

[1][https://ahrefs.com/site-
explorer/overview/subdomains/?target...](https://ahrefs.com/site-
explorer/overview/subdomains/?target=example.com)
[2][http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-
explorer?q=example.c...](http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-
explorer?q=example.com&oq=example.com&IndexDataSource=F)
[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
6.8M backlinks - woah.

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

~~~
heyalexej
There'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
This.

------
jcr
The 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
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.

~~~
jcr
$ 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
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.

~~~
jcr
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-four
> 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
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.

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

------
inthewoods
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.

~~~
__float
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.

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

------
sutterbomb
~2M visits a month, 60% direct and 30% referral.
[http://www.similarweb.com/website/example.com](http://www.similarweb.com/website/example.com)

------
chippy
Archive.org has copies of this from 2002 with some variation over time
[https://web.archive.org/web/20020120142510/http://example.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020120142510/http://example.com/)

------
jaxbot
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](https://gist.github.com/jaxbot/a11d55ddaa12901162e5)

~~~
ejr
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...](http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://example.com)

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joosters
The [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?

------
AzioMurad
It'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)

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

~~~
duskwuff
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.

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

~~~
gizmo686
Not an answer, but I just checked localhost.com to see what is there. 302
redirect to google.

~~~
kngspook
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)

