I asked this as a comment on my previous post, but I still have some questions. 1: If ML stands for Mali and they’re not from Mali, then why would they represent a foreign country? 2: Since it’s not Mali, what does the ML stand for? If it’s a pair of letters, it represents a country or stands for two words. Machine Learning? McCartney Lennon? Mega Lemmy?
Top level as in it’s the top/beginning of the domain. (reading right to left separated by periods)
Domains have different parts: subdomain.rootzonedomain.topleveldomain
So using the example: google.com
Google owns the ‘google’ portion of the domain, called the root zone domain. They pay VeriSign Global Registry Services (the owner of the ‘com’ top level domain) to keep the fully qualified domain name ‘google.com’ registered to google inc. Google can then add anything they want to the beginning of the domain such as keep.google.com. These are called sub-domains. They could be part of and used by the company itself or even rented out by google the same way google pays VeriSign for their ‘com’ registration.
For example: No-ip is a service that will freely rent subdomains of their no-ip.com domain, mainly so you can easily reach your self-hosted services without needing to remember your home IP. You could host lemmy.no-ip.com if you wanted to.
The owners of sought after tlds like ‘com’ and ‘net’ set the prices higher than some others as there is more demand. Because of this many self-hosters amd smaller companies just use cheaper tlds like ‘ml’. The extra cost isn’t really worth it.
Great explanation. Thank you.