How to. domain works?

Question

Can somebody explain why and how "to." domain works? It's not usual.

http://to./

Answer 1

is equivalent to http://to/ The site is simply hosted on the top level domain to.

The same could be hosted at http://com/ if whoever is in charge of com wanted to. You typically see it with the . like http://to./ so it doesn't resolve to a local machine named to or get resolved by the browser incorrectly.

Answer 2

Are you referring to the Tonga top-level domain? If so, it's just another TLD for a specific country.

Answer 3

I suspect that you're asking about the .to ccTLD for the country of Tonga.

Answer 4

The . is superfluous—the actual domain is http://to/, but Firefox, at the very least, converts that to http://www.to.com/, and that's not what we're going for at all. Additional . characters on each side don't mean anything, and appending a . lets the browser know that that's all we want. http://.to/ should also work, but Firefox seems to want to point it to http://www.to/.

.to is a top-level domain that belongs to Tonga, and the company in charge of allocating domain names has created one with no second-level domain, which is perfectly legal.