elk.sh

A lot of my projects are under the domain elk.sh. When I don’t want to buy a new domain for a project, I stick it as a subdomain under elk.sh — you can even see all the projects under that domain.

It’s really all about having something as short as possible, so that the final domain (something.elk.sh) isn’t too long.

I first bought the domain in the summer of 2018, in the summer between freshman and sophomore years of high school.

I was taking inspiration from the hosting service now.sh from ZEIT (which has since rebranded to Vercel), which would let you assign your projects a something.now.sh subdomain.

I wanted my own version of that, where I could choose any subdomain without other people having already claimed all the good ones.

.sh is a top-level domain ending that’s meant for the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, but in practice it’s used for a lot of tech projects because the popular programming language Bash uses files that end in .sh (like my-script.sh).

So I went on a search for three letter words that were available .sh domains. Eventually I came across the name elk, nabbed it, and here we are today.

It’s honestly not the best name — elk.sh is a pretty arbitrary string of letters. But it doesn’t really seem to have mattered. When users have cared enough, for example with Blocks (blocks.elk.sh) in high school, they’ve committed the letters to memory well enough.