Why do urls like allegory.com and smelt.com redirect to godaddy? Does no one really own those by this point? I feel like just about every common word or phrase would have been taken by now.

Question

Also leg.com and smell.com don’t appear to be owned.

In: 45

Answer 1

It’s called “domain parking” and it’s done for different reasons.

Sometimes it’s people speculating that they can register the domain and sell it later for a profit. Perfectly legal unless you register a domain name that is somebody else’s trademark.

Sometimes it’s someone with future plans for the domain.

Sometimes the domain is actually being used, just not for any public-facing content. Examples would be managing a personal mail domain, or hosting a personal cloud storage system.