Exercism has moved to exercism.org

Exercism has a new home at exercism.org!

For the last 8 years Exercism has lived at exercism.io and we decided it was time for a change!

If you're interested, here are a few of the reasons why we made this decision.

Primarily, we feel that the .org domain better represents what Exercism is. Most new projects begin with finding whatever domain is available, and .io was a nice fit as it's often associated with I/O. But as we've grown, evolved, and become a larger platform, we've felt for a while that it was time for a more "official" seeming domain. We own exercism.com, exercism.net, and a few others, but we feel that exercism.org best represents our not-for-profit mission and gives the best first impression. As we also look to raise donations from both our community and from organisations, we felt that the more professional .org also offers more trust, especially as our name can sometimes give a slightly jarring first impression…

Secondly, being on an io domain gives a little less safety than using one of the original TLDs. Back in 2017 the io authoritative nameservers were compromised using a pretty trivial method, and while mistakes happen and things were quickly rectified, this isn't the sort of thing that's going to happen to .org domains. We've also had sporadic issues with DNS resolving, with people being unable to access the site. We've never been able to track this down exactly, but our best understanding is that something occasionally goes wrong at the .io level, rather than the AWS level.

There are also some questions about the ongoing ownership of the io TLD, and the potential consequences of that, which derive from the origins of the .io TLD and who benefits from it. If you're interested in reading more on that, this article outlines some of the information.

All things together, we felt that moving to .org was the right step for us. It's something we've been planning for a couple of years now, and felt that with the upheaval of launching v3, the time was right to do it. If you hate all of these reasons, feel that we've betrayed our roots, have no principles, and have sold out, sorry for spoiling your day. To everyone else, I hope you enjoy our new home!