
Ask HN: Best new startup TLD, other than .com? - plessthanpt05
What do think is the best tld for a new b2b data analytic&#x2F;tech start-up nowadays (.io, .co, .ai, etc)? And please don&#x27;t just say .com instead; I genuinely would like to know what folks think is the best current alternative?
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sixhobbits
OP: please don't say 'just get dot com'

All comments: 'just get dot com'

I had the same question and went with .co. I think .io is falling in
popularity due to dns scandal. More and more people are using .dev now and .ai
is also ok.

Problem with .co is people tend to assume it's a typo outside of tech (eg my
bank).

A lot of startups I follow moved to .com after a few years so I assume there
are more pain points that I haven't discovered yet.

My intuition for ranking is something like

.co

.dev

.ai

.io

But would love to see data on trends by company size etc if anyone has.

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winrid
We are suggesting that because it makes sense! :)

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sixhobbits
Me: I'm writing an essay about the second man on the moon. Anyone have
information on him?

Everyone: Neil Armstrong was cool. Write about him rather.

~~~
ta17711771
This would be equivalent only if writing about the originally asked about guy
would open you up to domain security risks...

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vmurthy
I did a bit of digging around to see some data around TLDs and one of the top
hits seems to be Hosting Tribunal[0]. Some interesting stats :

The top 4 gTLDs seem to be .com, .org, .net, .co. dot com clearly won't make
the cut for you but have you considered .net?

Interestingly, [1] led to [https://ntldstats.com](https://ntldstats.com) and
this has a nicer graph based data. I found that .xyz has a 9.3% market share
overall which is interesting as well.

[1] [https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/tld-
statistics/#gref](https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/tld-statistics/#gref) [2]
[https://ntldstats.com](https://ntldstats.com)

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akg_67
A better question might be what TLDs not to use.

Based on the contact form spam, my sites receive, don’t get .xyz, .site, and
.online. I am sure, there are others like me, who block these TLDs.

Also, don’t get a region TLD, if you are not planning to serve that region.

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foreigner
I just made this decision for my own project. After a lot of hand-wringing I
decided that the name of the project doesn't matter very much compared to the
ease of having a .com domain name, so I picked a project name based on
availability of the .com domain instead of the other way around.

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html5web
Use .xyz domain. Once your startup becomes successful you can buy your tld of
choice.

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client4
I agree with this; the only downside is aggressive spam filtering often
sinkholes XYZ domains. After having 3-4 important emails get sent to a
customer's spam inbox in a month we moved to a .com

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popped
Would appreciate more info. We are on .xyz and haven't had issues but maybe
haven't noticed.

TIA

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avian
Running my own mail server. Off the top of my head, I would also say that the
.xyz domain is predominantly used for spam. I remember reading on HN once that
this is because it's a TLD where it's easy to register throw-away domains. But
maybe that's just the effect of me remembering it more since it's unusual?
Anyway, I did a quick check:

For the approximately last 12 months, the probability of a message mentioning
".xyz" in them being spam was approximately 7.4:1. In other words, for every 8
messages received that had ".xyz" somewhere in the headers or body, 7 would
get classified as spam by my Bayesian spam filter and 1 would be classified as
non-spam.

In fact, looking at the spam filter database, I see a huge amount of .xyz
domains in there that appear obvious throwaways in the pattern wordNN.xyz
where "word" is some random word and NN is a counter that counts up from 1.

I'm not saying that is the general situation. It just appears that in my
corner of the net, a message coming from an .xyz is indeed a pretty strong
signal that it's spam.

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winrid
.com is sufficient if you have a good name. Also, the DNS resolvers for .com
tend to be quite good.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/bunnycdn.com/blog/is-your-
fancy...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/bunnycdn.com/blog/is-your-fancy-new-
domain-hurting-your-performance-gtld-benchmark/amp/)

Also, .com is easy to share via word of mouth. It's more work to say "yeah
it's salt, then dot ly" than "salty dot com".

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kugelblitz
I used to favor .io, now I like .dev or .sh. .ai if appropriate. Never really
liked .co (too close to .com).

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craftkiller
Avoid the .ai TLD since it does not support DNSSEC
[http://stats.research.icann.org/dns/tld_report/](http://stats.research.icann.org/dns/tld_report/)
. Even if you don't care about DNSSEC, your clients will and it will come up
in security reviews.

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tptacek
It in fact does not come up in security reviews, as you can see from the fact
that virtually none of the US companies that have security teams† have signed
zones. Route53, AWS's DNS service, doesn't even support DNSSEC. People are not
getting dinged in audits for using AWS. I've been doing security assessments
since 1997 (and vulnerability research before that) and I have never seen
DNSSEC made an issue in an audit report.

† _actually, there are too many words in that sentence, and I should just say
"none of the US companies"._

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tkjef
my list goes from best to worst:

.com

.io

.fyi

.co

.net

.xyz i have not seen anything noteworthy on other than personal sites.

i feel like .fyi is going to blow up in the next 10 years. there are TONS of
good .fyi domains available and they are typically arount $8 to register as
opposed to the $34 .io domains.

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schwartzworld
It's worth noting that if you go with a less known TLD, some websites will not
recognize your email as valid. I use .world and have had to use my Gmail as
backup for signing up for things.

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MH15
This is definitely a problem limited to certain generations but my .codes
domain doesn't get registered as a link in Snapchat.

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notRobot
It doesn't matter? Either get .com or get literally anything else.

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plessthanpt05
If it didn't matter, than why would someone pay thousands of dollars (or more)
to a squatter for the .com when the .co (or .whatever) was still available?
Maybe it matters less for landing pages for phone apps, but otherwise it seems
like it does matter for sites primarily accessed for usage via browser.

~~~
notRobot
What I was trying to say was if you can't get .com, which is considered the
"default" by many, it doesn't matter which of the other ones you get.

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zelly
If you absolutely must, I would go for a well-recognized ccTLD like .AI or .IO
or .CO. Avoid all the new gTLDs like the plague.

If it's a commercial endeavor, I would urge you to get a dotcom and get
creative with the name. A long-ugly-hyphenated-domain.com would be taken more
seriously than a short LLL.WEBSITE or LLL.BLUE or whatever.

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bruce511
It turns out that people don't really put much effort into avoiding the
plague, so I'm getting mixed messages here...

