8 ms·

Build an amazing app/platform/service. Host it on whatever tld is cheaper/convenient/some_other_criteria. No one will care what the extension is - especially wi

Build an amazing app/platform/service. Host it on whatever tld is cheaper/convenient/some_other_criteria. No one will care what the extension is - especially with current and upcoming consumption models (mobile apps, vr/ar, and so on).

throwvirtever 5y ago
Is there any objective reason (performance, reliability, etc) to avoid certain TLDs?
- eropple 5y ago
  ccTLDs are perhaps marginally less reliable given who has overriding control over them (.ly is Libya, for example), but beyond that it's probably pretty low on your list of things to care about.
  - SanchoPanda 5y ago
    This is not true if you want email to come from you main domain and you choose a remotely exotic TLD. I learned this the hard way. Don't be like me, choose a boring TLD, worry about less stupid things - there are so so many already.
    - eropple 5y ago
      That's a good point, I was thinking of it from a web perspective.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Some country tlds are risky because they don't necessarily check residency requirements when you purchase, but might later if your domain catches their attention. Not all have residency requirements, but some do. There's also some TLDs that are well known for web spam, phishing, or email spam, sometimes because of free or cheap subdomains. Those might have issues getting indexed in Google, or issues with SMTP delivery. Google once deindexed the entirety of *.co.cc, for example.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  I remember reading a blog post that I can't find that one company saw a massive uptick on email deliverability when they stop using .xyz and moved to a more standard one. It makes some sense, .xyz are so cheap that I've bought mines for $1 so just buying a domain every day isn't outside the realms of possbility for spammers. Personally, I just use my .xyz domains for internal stuff where I still want things connected to the internet and available.
- Macha 5y ago
  .com/.net/.org - your name is probably gone New gTLDs - The registry can pretty much arbitrarily set prices in the future ccTLDs - Politics might make you have to change domain (e.g. UK owners of .eu) Pick your poison, I tend to stick with the original TLDs and my own country's ccTLD
  - MisterSandman 5y ago
    How is .me? It's used a lot by students for their portfolio, I bit the bullet but wondering if I screwed up.
    - smcn 5y ago
      .me is absolutely fine and, as an employer, I would not mark down an applicant for using it.
    - kijin 5y ago
      IMO .me is one of the safer ccTLDs. It's from a fairly stable country that hasn't been keen to hike up the prices or impose restrictions on who can have their domains so far; it's not often associated with spam; and it's even used by large companies like Facebook (fb.me). When it comes to pricing, though, you never know what will happen down the road. I honestly don't know who I'd like to trust more: Verisign or the government of Montenegro?
      - account42 5y ago
        > When it comes to pricing, though, you never know what will happen down the road. I honestly don't know who I'd like to trust more: Verisign or the government of Montenegro? Since .me is more targetet at / suitable for individuals rather than a hipster startup domain like .io, the prices will hopefully remain lower. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself.
- r1ch 5y ago
  The $1 TLDs like .top .xyz .fun etc will be blocked in a lot of places due to heavy spam and malware distribution.
  - gtldexplosion 5y ago
    Purely untrue for .xyz, which has an excellent anti—abuse program and scores equal or less than .com in abuse stats. Why would Square, Inc rebrand on block.xyz if that were true? Check it out :)
- atomicnumber3 5y ago
  A couple, but they're all "human" reasons and not really technical. The TLDs records will be served off the gTLD nameservers like everything else, you can change your own nameservers from there, and DNS is slow as hell anyway (by modern standards) so it's already not like it's tightly optimized usually, and performance as perceived by the end user is greatly predicated on how warm their cache is. So any performance difference between nameservers probably barely matters unless you're like Amazon or something. Anyway, non-objective reasons I can think of: Lots of people don't know anything but com exists. Com is definitely still dominant, so someone sitting on yourthing.com when yourthing.biz.no is your real site will probably be getting some chunk of your traffic. Imagine if Amazon.co.uk was the real Amazon and Amazon.com was like, a news website dedicated to posting all the bad stuff Amazon does. Tbh that'd be nice for society but you can probably understand it would be undesirable for a company. .io is one of the only ones that's managed to kinda read com-like status, and it's only for a niche (though a lucrative niche!) audience.
  - Macha 5y ago
    > Imagine if Amazon.co.uk was the real Amazon and Amazon.com was like This is actually an interesting example, because Amazon.com is a US/Canada specific site, while Amazon.co.uk is the UK/Ireland site (though I'd imagine they'll eventually either set up an Amazon.ie or change the redirect to Amazon.de with the tax/import brexit implications of that). So while all domains are Amazon owned, I wouldn't say Amazon has .com primacy over regional domains. Ditto for google search, though the rest of their products are on google.com for me (I think gmail used to be googlemail.co.uk in the UK and googlemail.de in Germany because of local companies who had the gmail name first, until Google bought out the names from the local owners). All the web 2.0 or newer companies are .com rather than regionalised though.
- blamarvt 5y ago
  While there are some performance differences [1] between TLDs, I don't personally think it should factor very heavily when choosing one. As for reliability, there have been a few ".io" outages and I remember ".club" going down a few years ago but DNS makes complete TLD outages pretty rare. I'd say the biggest reason to avoid certain TLDs is the human factor. Humans are used to typing ".com" or ".org" or ".net". I don't have any data to back that up though, so it probably isn't a satisfying answer! [1] https://blog.nameshield.com/blog/2020/04/30/choosing-the-right-tld-based-on-dns-performance/ https://blog.nameshield.com/blog/2020/04/30/choosing-the-rig...
oefrha 5y ago
> No one will care what the extension is Until you try to send emails from your random TLD domain and they all end up in spam. Or when your shitty TLD has a NIC-level DNS outage. (.club had one a few weeks ago for instance, experienced it firsthand.) Or no outage, but resolves slowly.
- mrv_dev 5y ago
  Company: oefrha-galactic-corporation.com Project: oefrha-super-app.${something} One owns the other. Useful for running multiple experiments at once, though shifting to a different structure is better (imho) if the experiment is succesful.
reaperducer 5y ago
No one will care what the extension is Only on HN. In the real world, it matters quite a lot. I tried to get a healthcare company to pick up its .health equivalent. The marketing department included the possibility of using the domain in its annual customer survey. The result was that a very large number of patients believed it to be a spam or scam domain.
- treesknees 5y ago
  Even as a competent user myself, I still hesitate when I see a .biz or .info domain. I wouldn't say I trust .com's more, but it's certainly built into my mental checklist when evaluating if something is legitimate. For decades the unconventional cheaper domains were used for spam purposes.
  - freedomben 5y ago
    Yep, for those of us who were around in the earlier days of the internet, .biz means low quality at best, spam, popups, and malware at worst.
slig 5y ago
It's not that simple. See @substack's example. He has the .net domain, and now a new company with unlimited $ bought the .com.
cblconfederate 5y ago
You can always find a suitable .com domain, which is at the top of the squatting pecking order. Just need to be creative and flexible
jraph 5y ago
StartCom refused to issue free certificates for free .tk domains, "back in the day", for spam-related concerns. Emails from these domains may be blocked, too, I guess. So the tld matters a bit still.

throwvirtever 5y ago

Is there any objective reason (performance, reliability, etc) to avoid certain TLDs?

eropple 5y ago
ccTLDs are perhaps marginally less reliable given who has overriding control over them (.ly is Libya, for example), but beyond that it's probably pretty low on your list of things to care about.
- SanchoPanda 5y ago
  This is not true if you want email to come from you main domain and you choose a remotely exotic TLD. I learned this the hard way. Don't be like me, choose a boring TLD, worry about less stupid things - there are so so many already.
  - eropple 5y ago
    That's a good point, I was thinking of it from a web perspective.
tyingq 5y ago
Some country tlds are risky because they don't necessarily check residency requirements when you purchase, but might later if your domain catches their attention. Not all have residency requirements, but some do. There's also some TLDs that are well known for web spam, phishing, or email spam, sometimes because of free or cheap subdomains. Those might have issues getting indexed in Google, or issues with SMTP delivery. Google once deindexed the entirety of *.co.cc, for example.
that_guy_iain 5y ago
I remember reading a blog post that I can't find that one company saw a massive uptick on email deliverability when they stop using .xyz and moved to a more standard one. It makes some sense, .xyz are so cheap that I've bought mines for $1 so just buying a domain every day isn't outside the realms of possbility for spammers. Personally, I just use my .xyz domains for internal stuff where I still want things connected to the internet and available.
Macha 5y ago
.com/.net/.org - your name is probably gone New gTLDs - The registry can pretty much arbitrarily set prices in the future ccTLDs - Politics might make you have to change domain (e.g. UK owners of .eu) Pick your poison, I tend to stick with the original TLDs and my own country's ccTLD
- MisterSandman 5y ago
  How is .me? It's used a lot by students for their portfolio, I bit the bullet but wondering if I screwed up.
  - smcn 5y ago
    .me is absolutely fine and, as an employer, I would not mark down an applicant for using it.
  - kijin 5y ago
    IMO .me is one of the safer ccTLDs. It's from a fairly stable country that hasn't been keen to hike up the prices or impose restrictions on who can have their domains so far; it's not often associated with spam; and it's even used by large companies like Facebook (fb.me). When it comes to pricing, though, you never know what will happen down the road. I honestly don't know who I'd like to trust more: Verisign or the government of Montenegro?
    - account42 5y ago
      > When it comes to pricing, though, you never know what will happen down the road. I honestly don't know who I'd like to trust more: Verisign or the government of Montenegro? Since .me is more targetet at / suitable for individuals rather than a hipster startup domain like .io, the prices will hopefully remain lower. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself.
r1ch 5y ago
The $1 TLDs like .top .xyz .fun etc will be blocked in a lot of places due to heavy spam and malware distribution.
- gtldexplosion 5y ago
  Purely untrue for .xyz, which has an excellent anti—abuse program and scores equal or less than .com in abuse stats. Why would Square, Inc rebrand on block.xyz if that were true? Check it out :)
atomicnumber3 5y ago
A couple, but they're all "human" reasons and not really technical. The TLDs records will be served off the gTLD nameservers like everything else, you can change your own nameservers from there, and DNS is slow as hell anyway (by modern standards) so it's already not like it's tightly optimized usually, and performance as perceived by the end user is greatly predicated on how warm their cache is. So any performance difference between nameservers probably barely matters unless you're like Amazon or something. Anyway, non-objective reasons I can think of: Lots of people don't know anything but com exists. Com is definitely still dominant, so someone sitting on yourthing.com when yourthing.biz.no is your real site will probably be getting some chunk of your traffic. Imagine if Amazon.co.uk was the real Amazon and Amazon.com was like, a news website dedicated to posting all the bad stuff Amazon does. Tbh that'd be nice for society but you can probably understand it would be undesirable for a company. .io is one of the only ones that's managed to kinda read com-like status, and it's only for a niche (though a lucrative niche!) audience.
- Macha 5y ago
  > Imagine if Amazon.co.uk was the real Amazon and Amazon.com was like This is actually an interesting example, because Amazon.com is a US/Canada specific site, while Amazon.co.uk is the UK/Ireland site (though I'd imagine they'll eventually either set up an Amazon.ie or change the redirect to Amazon.de with the tax/import brexit implications of that). So while all domains are Amazon owned, I wouldn't say Amazon has .com primacy over regional domains. Ditto for google search, though the rest of their products are on google.com for me (I think gmail used to be googlemail.co.uk in the UK and googlemail.de in Germany because of local companies who had the gmail name first, until Google bought out the names from the local owners). All the web 2.0 or newer companies are .com rather than regionalised though.
blamarvt 5y ago
While there are some performance differences [1] between TLDs, I don't personally think it should factor very heavily when choosing one. As for reliability, there have been a few ".io" outages and I remember ".club" going down a few years ago but DNS makes complete TLD outages pretty rare. I'd say the biggest reason to avoid certain TLDs is the human factor. Humans are used to typing ".com" or ".org" or ".net". I don't have any data to back that up though, so it probably isn't a satisfying answer! [1] https://blog.nameshield.com/blog/2020/04/30/choosing-the-right-tld-based-on-dns-performance/ https://blog.nameshield.com/blog/2020/04/30/choosing-the-rig...

oefrha 5y ago

> No one will care what the extension is Until you try to send emails from your random TLD domain and they all end up in spam. Or when your shitty TLD has a NIC-level DNS outage. (.club had one a few weeks ago for instance, experienced it firsthand.) Or no outage, but resolves slowly.

mrv_dev 5y ago
Company: oefrha-galactic-corporation.com Project: oefrha-super-app.${something} One owns the other. Useful for running multiple experiments at once, though shifting to a different structure is better (imho) if the experiment is succesful.

reaperducer 5y ago

No one will care what the extension is Only on HN. In the real world, it matters quite a lot. I tried to get a healthcare company to pick up its .health equivalent. The marketing department included the possibility of using the domain in its annual customer survey. The result was that a very large number of patients believed it to be a spam or scam domain.

treesknees 5y ago
Even as a competent user myself, I still hesitate when I see a .biz or .info domain. I wouldn't say I trust .com's more, but it's certainly built into my mental checklist when evaluating if something is legitimate. For decades the unconventional cheaper domains were used for spam purposes.
- freedomben 5y ago
  Yep, for those of us who were around in the earlier days of the internet, .biz means low quality at best, spam, popups, and malware at worst.

slig 5y ago

It's not that simple. See @substack's example. He has the .net domain, and now a new company with unlimited $ bought the .com.

cblconfederate 5y ago

You can always find a suitable .com domain, which is at the top of the squatting pecking order. Just need to be creative and flexible

jraph 5y ago

StartCom refused to issue free certificates for free .tk domains, "back in the day", for spam-related concerns. Emails from these domains may be blocked, too, I guess. So the tld matters a bit still.