Wednesday 22 June 2016

.to

.to is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the island kingdom of Tonga.

The government of Tonga sells domains in its ccTLD to any interested party. The .to ccTLD is administered by the Tonga Network Information Center (Tonic).

Because to is a common English preposition, it became popular to craft memorable URLs called domain hacks that take advantage of this; URL shortening/redirection services (e.g. go.to) are a popular use. Other domain hacks do not use the to as a preposition, including Daniel J. Bernstein's website cr.yp.to, London web development company Potato p.ota.to, and uploading services like uloz.to (which means "save it" in Czech and Slovak).

"T.O." is also a common nickname for Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is used as a city domain extension as exemplified by popular Toronto sites www.dine.to and www.jobs.to. This domain extension is also used for the city of Torino (Turin), Italy.

As the .to domains are purchased, all normal DNS operations are possible and registered sites are not required to display ads on behalf of the registrar. Some domains are free, like .edu.to, but only to real Tongan educational institutions. At this moment businesses registered in Tonga can also get free domains. People who sell on .to domains can claim a commission.




Tonga


Tonga, officially the Kingdom of Tonga, is a Polynesian sovereign state and archipelago comprising 169 islands of which 36 are inhabited. The total surface area is about 750 square kilometres (290 sq mi) scattered over 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) of the southern Pacific Ocean. It has a population 103,000 people of whom 70% reside on the main island of Tongatapu.


Tonga stretches over about 800 kilometres (500 mi) in a north-south line – about a third of the distance from New Zealand to Hawaii. It is surrounded by Fiji and Wallis and Futuna (France) to the northwest, Samoa to the northeast, Niue to the east, Kermadec (part of New Zealand) to the southwest, and New Caledonia (France) and Vanuatu to the farther west.

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