For the longest time my site has been tracked and spammed by 163data.com.cn. I, and others, have wondered about the story behind the number 163. Was it a Chinese Army unit number similar to 解放军 61398部隊? Alas, there seems to be nothing so exciting. There are only a few links about the history of 163.
It looks like in the ’90s when you had to dial a telephone number to a modem and reach the internet, 163 was appended to a local number. Thus 163 was commonly used and therefore memorable. After this time NetEase started 163.com and used 163 to start China’s largest free email service, the Chinese equivalent to gmail. 163.com remains very popular in China today.
The digits in a domain name usually aren’t random. The Internet company NetEase uses the web address 163.com—a throwback to the days of dial-up when Chinese Internet users had to enter 163 to get online.
source
There are others that say that 163, or 一六三 (yiliusan) sounds like 一路上” (yilushang) “all through the journey”, but that is a bit of a stretch of the imagination.
An interesting one is 517.com 五一七 (wuyaoqi) sounds like 我要吃 (woyaochi) “I want to eat”. For Westerners, this makes little sense, but for Chinese people there is meaning.
