Self-hosting is becoming a big topic nowadays as some people want to either control their own data or learn more about how technology works by running their own services in their home. ICANN aims to make that easier for people by reserving the .internal Top Level Domain (TLD) from being used on the Internet. It"s also interesting to note that IEEE has already reserved .home.arpa for internal home use via RFC 8375, but .internal is a cleaner name.
Earlier this year, ICANN requested comments on the proposed TLD and when nobody had concerns (other than the length of the TLD), it was presented to the ICANN board for further consideration. According to The Register, ICANN has now ratified this domain, meaning nobody on the Internet can ever register a domain name such as neowin.internal.
You may not know, but there"s already a similar setup for specific IP addresses that are not allowed to be routed on the Internet. Defined by RFC 1918, addresses in the 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16 ranges are for internal network use only. The new ICANN standard means you can now host your own DNS and Certificate Authority (for encryption) in your internal network using these addresses and TLD without fear of anything breaking in your network in the future.
If you do decide to use this new Top Level Domain, keep in mind that you won"t be able to use a service like Let"s Encrypt with it because there is no specific owner of any subdomain of .internal. You"ll be able to build your own if you want, but you"ll still have to purchase a public domain if you want certificates that are known by the world.
If you"re interested in learning more about self-hosting, you should check out our article explaining the pros and cons. From there, you can read the entire series which currently covers installing and configuring the Proxmox hypervisor and then installing Windows and Linux virtual machines on top of Proxmox.
Image via Depositphotos