How are the suffixes of websites determined? For example, why is a particular website .com or .org or .in? — D, India
Although yours isn’t a physics question, it’s one that’s interesting to me and easy to answer. The person who sets up the website gets to choose the domain. That’s all there is to it. As long as the complete domain name hasn’t already been registered, you can pay a fee and register it. For example, I chose to register this website as www.howeverythingworks.org because I feel more like an organization (of one person) than a commercial enterprise. I could have registered it as www.howeverythingworks.in, but that would imply I’m in India and I’m not. The only exception that I know of is .edu, which is restricted to educational institutions. I would not be allowed to register this website as www.howeverythingworks.edu.
Actually, I could have registered this website as www.howeverythingworks.com, but I would have had to purchase that domain name from someone else. It is registered to a cybersquatter—someone who registers a domain name in hopes of selling it at a profit to someone else. Cybersquatting was hugely popular during the internet bubble, when companies were paying vast amounts of money for particular domain names. But these days, who wants to pay thousands of dollars for a name? I’m totally happy to be www.howeverythingworks.org and I’ll let someone else pay the big bucks to purchase www.howeverythingworks.com. In the meantime, that domain is just a link to advertising and an offer to sell the domain name.