Vanity domains may be compared with vanity car registration plates, which similarly identify their owner as an individual and not just someone relying on another organisation's services.
Other definitions include: These uses apply primarily to regular domain names registered at the highest allowed level rather than subdomains (although, technically speaking, a second-level domain is actually a subdomain of its top-level domain).
Because vanity domains are operated for or on behalf of individuals, they typically will not offer the full complement of services an organisational domain name (or rather, the host that it points to) would be expected to honour; for example, the DNS record may contain only an MX record identifying a mail server accepting e-mail for that domain (which may itself be an e-mail forwarding server) and an A record identifying a shared web hosting service only offering HTTP (which may itself be a URL redirection service).
A top-level domain can become part of a vanity URL.
Taking advantage of countries that do not ask for proof of residence to register their country-specific TLDs (Top Level Domains) can allow a user to incorporate the two or three letters following the dot, using them to help spell out the desired name, word or phrase.