Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

10 places with an Internet top-level domain but hardly any people

Tiny place with TLD

Most country code top-level domains on the Internet represent areas with millions of people, such as .uk (United Kingdom), .ca (Canada), .de (Germany), .se (Sweden), and so on, but there a places where the population isn’t counted in the millions, or even thousands, that still have their very own top-level domain on the Internet. Some of them aren’t even inhabited.

IANA, the organization that administers the domain name system, bases its allocation of country code top-level domains on the standard country code list in ISO 3166-1 which defines codes for “the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest.”

The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO 3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which entities should be and should not be on that list. ( – Jon Postel, RFC 1591)

This has led to some really interesting situations with top-level domains (TLDs) for places where no one actually lives, or with very tiny populations.

TLDs for 10 places with tiny populations

We have sorted them by population size, smallest first.

.hm – Heard and McDonald Islands

Population: 0

A territory of Australia, the Heard and McDonald Islands is a group of barren, uninhabited volcanic islands in the middle of the ocean between Africa and Antarctica. The main reason there are any domain names registered for .hm is that it’s been marketed as a “home” address.

.pn – Pitcairn Islands

Population: 50

The Pitcairn Islands consists of four volcanic islands in the southern Pacific Ocean and is a former British colony. It’s the home of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers.

.tf – French Southern and Antarctic Lands

Population: 140

A number of islands spread over a rather large area of the Indian Ocean between Africa and Australia. There is no permanent population; merely a group of military personnel, scientists, officials and support staff.

.cc – Cocos (Keeling) Islands

Population: 596

A territory of Australia, the Cocos Islands is a group of islands located in the Indian Ocean about halfway between India and Australia. The .cc TLD is also used by the Turkish part of Cyprus, mainly because only Turkey recognizes it as a sovereign state so it won’t get its own TLD.

.va – Vatican City

Population: 826

Vatican City is of course the well-known walled city-state within Rome that serves as the high seat of the Catholic Church.

.ac – Ascension Island

Population: 940

Ascension Island is a volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean and is a territory of the United Kingdom. It is home to one of five ground antennas that assist in the operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS).

.aq – Antarctica

Population: 1,000 – 5,000

Antarctica has no permanent population; the only people in Antarctica are scientists living for periods of time in various research stations scattered over the continent. The .aq TLD is reserved for use by organizations that are conducting work in or promoting Antarctica.

.nu – Niue

Population: 1,398

An island nation just northeast of New Zealand, commonly known as the “Rock of Polynesia”. Since “nu” means “now” in Swedish, Danish and Dutch, .nu has been successfully marketed in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.

.tk – Tokelau

Population: 1,416

A territory of New Zealand, Tokelau consists of three islands in the southern Pacific Ocean north of New Zealand.

.io – British Indian Ocean Territory

Population: 3,500

Also known as Chagos Islands, it’s a territory of the United Kingdom. It’s a group of islands located about halfway between Africa and Indonesia. The population almost exclusively consists of a joint military outpost for the United Kingdom and United States.

Final words

Compare the above top-level domains with .in – India, population: 1.2 billion – and .cn – China, population: 1.3 billion. A wee bit of a difference. 🙂

Photo credit: Satellite photo by NASA

SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

Powerful transaction monitoring now complements the availability and real user [...]

Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate – Which One You Should Improve and Why

Tracking your website’s exit and bounce rates will give you insight into how [...]

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free