---
title: "I Checked Every php.* Domain on the Internet"
url: https://www.exakat.io/i-checked-every-php-domain-on-the-internet/
date: 2026-07-25
modified: 2026-07-25
author: "dams"
description: "I Checked Every php.* Domain on the Internet There are 1,437 top-level domains recognized by IANA today, things like .com, .museum, .fr, and obscure ones such as .ismaili and .bugatti...."
categories:
  - "Code auditing"
tags:
  - "php"
  - "tld"
image: https://www.exakat.io/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/directions.320.jpg
word_count: 2168
---

# I Checked Every php.* Domain on the Internet

# I Checked Every php.* Domain on the Internet

There are 1,437 top-level domains recognized by IANA today, things like `.com`, `.museum`, `.fr`, and obscure ones such as `.ismaili` and `.bugatti`. I decided to find out how much of the internet's `php.*` namespace has actually been claimed, checking `php.<tld>` against every single one of them and asking what, if anything, is actually there.

The answer is that barely half of it has been claimed at all. 758 of 1,437 possible `php.*` domains, 53% of the total, are sitting completely unregistered right now. That's not a rounding error, that's most of the map still blank. PHP has a lot of future left to explore, one weird TLD at a time.

Before we get to what's still open, let's look at what's already been built, starting at the top and working our way down into increasingly questionable territory.

## The Summit: php.net

There's exactly one `php.*` domain that everyone agrees on, and it's the one you'd guess: [php.net](https://www.php.net/), home base, the mothership, the place where the manual lives. No surprises, no jokes, just the actual PHP project doing exactly what it says on the tin.

What is mildly surprising is that PHP quietly holds onto a few decoys around it. [php.is](https://php.is/), [php.uz](https://php.uz/), and [php.yokohama](https://php.yokohama/) are an Icelandic ccTLD, an Uzbek one, and a Japanese city-specific gTLD respectively, and all three redirect straight back to php.net. Nobody is publishing PHP news from Reykjavík or Tashkent. These are defensive registrations, quietly forwarding traffic home, much like buying the house next door so nobody strange moves in. A modest empire: four domains out of 1,437 available. PHP could have claimed so much more territory and simply chose not to.

## The Loyal Outposts: Where the Communities Live

One step down from the mothership is where things get genuinely charming, a scattered network of PHP user groups who staked their claim on a ccTLD as a badge of national pride. There's [php.de](https://www.php.de/), the long-running German PHP forum, [php.nl](https://php.nl/), the Dutch community's news and documentation hub, and [php.ru](https://php.ru/) and [php.zone](https://php.zone/), two sprawling Russian-language communities. [php.ar](https://php.ar/) represents Argentina, [php.rio](https://php.rio/) is Rio de Janeiro's developer group, and [php.sg](https://php.sg/) covers Singapore. [php.amsterdam](https://php.amsterdam/) and [php.ruhr](https://php.ruhr/en/) run regional German meetup scenes, [php.am](https://php.am/) speaks for Armenia, and [php.ug](https://php.ug/) modestly bills itself as "one home for one community".

It's not all thriving, though. [php.lt](https://php.lt/offline.php), Lithuania's community site, greets visitors with a wistful note that the site is currently unavailable due to a technical nuance, which reads like the most honest status message in the whole survey. [php.hr](https://php.hr/) in Croatia simply forwards you to a forum and gets out of the way. This is PHP's actual living, breathing community layer, modest and a little dusty in places, but entirely real.

## The Workshop: Tools Built By People Who Actually Use the Language

Below the community layer sits a scattered workshop of tools, references, and one-off projects built by developers scratching their own itch. [php.wtf](https://php.wtf/) lets you test code across 250+ PHP versions right in a browser, arguably the single most useful domain in this entire survey and a name that captures the emotional experience of debugging version differences rather well: kudos to everyone who recognized [php.wtf](https://3v4l.org/). [php.new](https://php.new/), known in the Laravel world as the "install PHP in seconds" tool, is growing as one of the most-used domains here, doing real onboarding work every day. [php.onl](https://php.onl/) runs PHP in your browser, offline and private. [php.date](https://php.date/) is a delightfully single-purpose `date()`-format cheat sheet. [php.watch](https://php.watch/) tracks RFCs and upcoming language changes. [php.style](https://php.style/) exists purely to make your code prettier via `php-cs-fixer`. [php.gt](https://www.php.gt/) is a full framework that few outside its niche have heard of. And [php.do](https://php.do/), in the finest tradition of TLD puns, exists to "Do it with PHP!"

This is PHP's actual developer-tooling ecosystem, distributed across a dozen uncoordinated domains that nobody thought to link to each other. Somebody should register a directory tying them all into one map. The obvious name for that directory turns out to already be taken, by nothing in particular. More on that below.

## The Rabbit Hole: When "PHP" Means Something Else Entirely

Here's where the survey stops being a tidy taxonomy and turns into genuine comedy. Twenty-eight live `php.*` domains have absolutely nothing to do with Hypertext Preprocessor, simply because it turns out three letters get reused a lot.

The best one is [php.casino](https://php.casino/), branded "PHP Group" and covered in ₱ symbols. That's because PHP is also the ISO 4217 currency code for the Philippine Peso. Every programmer who's ever complained that PHP doesn't pay enough has been unknowingly foreshadowing this domain.

Then there's [php.energy](https://php.energy/), which titles itself "PHP: Prolog Home Page," a direct and deliberate parody of php.net's own "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" recursive-acronym joke. It's a real, functioning, entirely different open-source project, Prolog compiled via C, that borrowed the bit simply because the bit was sitting right there.

[php.health](https://php.health/) serves a Japanese diversity-training and occupational-health site, almost certainly riffing on PHP Institute, Konosuke Matsushita's real "Peace, Happiness, Prosperity" foundation, which predates the programming language and has nothing to do with it. [php.express](https://php.express/) is a logistics company in the Philippines using "PHP" as plain company initials. [php.fi](https://php.fi/) is a Finnish investment holding company. [php.st](https://php.st/) is a Chinese security bookmarks portal, heavy on webshell and pentest links, which makes it PHP-adjacent in the sense that a lot of what gets hacked runs on PHP, though it's hardly a fan site. And [php.report](https://php.report/) turned out to be a generic URL shortener with zero interest in the language whose name it borrowed.

The pattern here is simple: PHP is short, pronounceable, and free of trademark baggage in most industries, so it gets grabbed by anyone who likes the sound of it. The programming language is, at best, a rounding error in the global demand for the string PHP. And, indeed, [PHP means a lot of different things in different places](https://www.exakat.io/what-does-php-mean/).

## The Ghost Town: Domains Someone Bought and Then Just Left

Fifteen more `php.*` domains are technically live, meaning they resolve and answer HTTP requests, yet have absolutely nothing to show for themselves. [php.cc](https://php.cc/) still shows its hosting provider's untouched default index page, cheerfully reading "Herzlich Willkommen! This is the standard index page of your web space," suggesting someone paid for hosting and then never got around to step two. [php.ooo](https://php.ooo/)is a bare, unconfigured WordPress install, radiating potential energy it will apparently never spend. [php.ps](https://php.ps/) proudly announces that "webserver is functioning normally," which is true and also the entire content of the page. [php.guru](https://php.guru/) greets you with an ad-injecting "Redirecting..." script that redirects to nothing worth mentioning.

Best of all, or worst, [php.guide](https://php.guide/), [php.international](https://php.international/), and [php.training](https://php.training/) are all running the exact same unbuilt website-builder template, down to the pixel. Someone, somewhere, bought three respectable-sounding `php.*` domains in one sitting and built zero websites across all of them. A trilogy of good intentions.

## The Flea Market: Fifty-Five Domains For Sale

Then there's the marketplace layer, 55 domains parked, listed, or actively hawked to the highest bidder. [php.io](https://php.io/), a domain that would carry real prestige in developer circles given how beloved `.io` is, sits on Afternic waiting for a buyer. [php.ad](https://php.ad/) and several siblings are up for grabs via Spaceship.com. [php.com](https://php.com/) itself, the single most obvious `php.*` domain that isn't php.net, sits behind a Cloudflare "Attention Required!" wall, which suggests someone cares enough to protect it but not enough to say why.

Our favorite listing, without question, is [php.rs](https://php.rs/). The page reads, verbatim: "Site Under Construction. In the meantime, you can check ext-php-rs to write PHP extensions in Rust. Spent way too much money on this domain, so..." It trails off exactly where the regret kicks in, making it the most honest domain-parking copy we found in the entire survey.

GoDaddy's auto-generated `/lander` parking page accounts for 20 of these all by itself, a small army of forgettable domains such as [php.club](https://php.club/), [php.doctor](https://php.doctor/), [php.institute](https://php.institute/), [php.marketing](https://php.marketing/), and [php.plus](https://php.plus/), all quietly redirecting to a sales funnel nobody asked for.

## Why Not Just Register .php Itself?

If chasing down individual `php.*` domains feels scattered, there's a bigger swing available: apply for `.php` as its own top-level domain. ICANN's New gTLD Program is opening a fresh application round in 2026, the first expansion since the 2012 round that introduced over 1,200 new TLDs in the first place. In theory, someone, some registry, some foundation, some very committed individual, could apply to run `.php` outright and hand out `something.php` addresses to the world.

In practice, the numbers make this a terrible idea for anyone without a spare fortune. The baseline ICANN evaluation fee alone is set at USD 227,000 per application, due within a week of the application window closing. That fee doesn't cover legal counsel, the technical back-end infrastructure a registry operator is required to run, or the ongoing operational costs of actually keeping a TLD alive for years afterward. Once all of that is added up, industry estimates for launching and operating a new gTLD commonly climb past the half-million mark and often reach well over a million dollars before the first domain is ever sold.

And the window itself is narrow. This round's application period opens on April 30, 2026 and closes on August 12, 2026, a little over three months in total. If anyone were seriously considering a bid for `.php`, the clock is very nearly out, at the time of writing this article.

All of which is really an argument for leaving this idea alone. A million dollars spent standing up a `.php` registry buys a vanity suffix and a mountain of ongoing compliance work. The same million dollars spent on, say, funding PHP core development, sponsoring conferences, or simply building out one of the empty domains below would do considerably more for the language than a new dot ever could.

## What's Still Wide Open

Which brings us back to where we started: 758 `php.*` domains, more than half the entire set, are sitting completely unregistered right now. Some of that is boring bureaucratic space, closed "dot-brand" TLDs like `.bmw` or `.google` that nobody but the trademark holder can ever register. But a genuinely large chunk is just open, available, unclaimed by anyone.

So, in the spirit of exploring what's left, two shortlists: one to make you laugh, one to make you nod.

### If you just want to be funny about it

- php.hiphop, which isn't even a joke, it's a callback. Facebook's PHP compiler was literally named HipHop for PHP, the ancestor of HHVM. Somebody needs to register this out of sheer historical duty.
- php.sucks, since `.sucks` is a real, registrable gTLD built specifically for complaint sites. Every developer who's ever raged at `==` versus `===` has a home waiting for them.
- php.vodka, for after the deploy. Still waiting for php.mojito and php.rhum-cola too.
- php.cricket, for the sound your error log makes in production when nobody's watching.
- php.horse, no justification required or available.
- php.baby, to announce your framework's 1.0 release.
- php.meme, self-explanatory and criminally unclaimed.

### If you actually want to build something useful

- php.docs, completely unregistered and arguably the single most glaring miss in this whole survey. A unified, community-run documentation hub deserves better than being scattered across a dozen personal blogs.
- php.forum, also open. The community clearly still wants forums, as php.de, php.ru, and php.nl all prove, it just hasn't consolidated onto the obvious domain.
- php.security, wide open, with real ongoing demand for a single trusted home for PHP vulnerability advisories and hardening guides.
- php.how, a "how do I do X in PHP" reference site, in the spirit of php.date and php.style, minus the version fragmentation.
- php.courses, open, unlike its cousins [php.academy](https://php.academy/) and [php.training](https://php.training/), both of which turned out to be either unrelated or unbuilt.
- php.cloud, open, and exactly the kind of umbrella term a modern PaaS or hosting product would want.

One near miss deserves a mention. [php.tools](https://php.tools/) looked like the obvious pick to finally tie php.wtf, php.onl, php.date, and php.style together into one map. It turns out to already be registered, DNS resolves, but nothing actually answers on the other end. Reserved and haunted, not available.

## The Actual Takeaway

Out of 1,437 possible `php.*` domains, only 78, about one in eighteen, serve real content. Of those 78, fewer than half have anything to do with the programming language at all. The rest is peso currency codes, Japanese management philosophy, Rust regret, and one very committed Prolog project cosplaying as PHP's own tagline.

And 758 domains are just sitting there, empty, waiting. That's a strange kind of headroom for a language this established. PHP isn't short on history. It's just short on people who've bothered to claim the rest of its own name.

---

*Methodology note: this survey checked RDAP/WHOIS registration status, DNS resolution, and live HTTP content for `php.<tld>`across all 1,437 TLDs in the IANA root zone as of July 2026. Parking and registration status changes constantly, so some of these domains will have flipped hands by the time you read this. Full dataset and scripts available on request. New gTLD Program figures are sourced from [ICANN's 2026 Round application page](https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round2) and its [gTLD evaluation fee FAQ](https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round2/2026-round-general/faqs/how-much-will-it-cost-to-apply-for-a-new-gtld).*