User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/How we're testing the fandom.com domain migration/@comment-24361909-20180928215953/@comment-20644-20180930194229

What's being underestimated here is the technical complexity of using country domains (thanks to Nanaki for pointing out the distinction between country and language, since that's another reason we're not doing this) on a site as big as FANDOM.

The language pathing option ([name].fandom.com/es or [name].fandom.com/pl and so forth) still means there's only 1 domain: fandom.com. But if we were to use fandom.es or fandom.pl, those are separate domains. So if we had 10 or 20 or 50 different country code URLs, then that's 10 or 20 or 50 different domains that we have to maintain. That's incredibly costly from a time and resource perspective.

If you're operating a small website with 500 pages, having multiple domains would be really easy. There's a lot less to maintain in that scenario. But on a site as big as FANDOM, we have to take into account the time and technical costs of testing, maintaining, and releasing code when there are dozens of extra URLs involved. The way the system works, the more URLs there are the costlier a release is and the more risk there is of something going wrong.

Given that, we have to ask ourselves, what is the benefit of having all those domains when instead we can just have 2 (fandom.com and wikia.com)?

So while having all those domains would be easy in a basic website set up, the technical complexity of a site the size of FANDOM means it’s just not a worthwhile endeavor. Especially when there’s a low-cost but just as effective solution with the language paths.