Yeah. I did it. I bought the longest domain I could.

Well, most of it anyway - I wanted to buy ahugeevergrowingpulsatingbrainthatrulesfromthecentreoftheultraworld.com, but had to settle for ahugeevergrowingpulsatingbrain.thatrulesfromthecentreoftheultraworld.com.

I learned something in the process: there is an upper limit to the number of characters in a domain name. And not just the domain, but each ‘label’ as they are called, being either subdomain, domain, or top level domain (TLD).

63 characters.

I think I broke half of the domain registrars when trying to buy it.

So I had to split at a logical point.

And then I just added the rest as a subdomain, with room to spare.

And thanks to my friend Chris Derby’s brilliant thinking, I bought the matching link shortener too (though it’s not actually set up just yet): ahegpbtrftcotu.com.

Next up - Let’s Encrypt breaks on the long domain: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/a-certificate-for-a-63-character-domain/78870?fbclid=IwAR30zkT2tAFAvxPaKmV4xTNTce8kTIplRve4ywZgffPMewCaMKLF5RX3DYk

Next up - I tried setting up my ahegpbtrftcotu.com link shortener on bit.ly and voila:

bit.ly requires custom domains to be 15 characters long max including the dot.

And now the why for this particular domain - the name of one of my favorite songs on my favorite album:

Wikipedia - A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld