Yeah. We did it. We bought the longest domain we could.

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

We 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.

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

So we had to split at a logical point.

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

And thanks to our friend Chris Derby’s brilliant thinking, we 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 - we tried setting up our 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 our favorite songs on our favorite album:

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