noah.is

I've been wanting a domain like this for a while (especially after I saw my former boss, Samy's (my hero) domain name, samy.pl), and then I found a domain checking service online that would look up a domain under every possible TLD and I found a few that were still available, .is being the most attractive of them all (come on, http://noah.is/awesome?).

It took a good number of hours wrestling with ISNIC about the DNS settings, though. They have retardedly strict requirements for DNS servers; the servers themselves have to be configured in the most strict way possible (matching forward and reverse DNS records for each of the name server hostnames for example), and furthermore they want all their DNS servers to be "registered" with ISNIC, and they want the person who manages the name servers to be the one who registers them.

Thus, using the ol' ns1.kirsle.net, ns2.kirsle.net was out of the picture, as my server has only one IP and I don't control the reverse DNS on that IP regardless. Luckily my web hosting company provides DNS forwarding services, and their servers are configured in the strict way ISNIC requires. I just had to register them with ISNIC ($karma--, I registered them with my own ISNIC name instead of bothering my web hosting company to do it; should be fine though, if they have any issues I'll forward the e-mails they send to the web host to deal with then).

ISNIC charges me 39 euros a year for the domain and they are the sole dictators of .is so I can't transfer to another registrar... but, again, http://noah.is/wicked.cool? Seriously.