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Ask HN: Best new startup TLD, other than .com?

27 points by plessthanpt05 ↗ HN
What do think is the best tld for a new b2b data analytic/tech start-up nowadays (.io, .co, .ai, etc)? And please don't just say .com instead; I genuinely would like to know what folks think is the best current alternative?

29 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 65.5 ms ] thread
notRobot
It doesn't matter? Either get .com or get literally anything else.
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.
html5web
Use .xyz domain. Once your startup becomes successful you can buy your tld of choice.
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
slavik81
It's unfortunate. As a computer graphics guy, it's fun to name my domains like GLSL variables.

I haven't had any trouble with the big consumer services. Providers like hotmail and gmail let me pass after the first user marked me as not spam, but some corporate filters just blackholed me.

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

TIA

client4
We had a few customers using Microsoft O360 who said they didn't receive our emails. After troubleshooting we discovered them in spam. For reference we were using Gsuite at a .xyz address. We checked with other customers who received our emails -- perhaps it was the domain, I attributed it to being an odd tld.
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.

paul_f
You could use myco.xyz for the web and mycomail.com for email
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.

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

winrid
We are suggesting that because it makes sense! :)
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...
longnguyen
If your product is an app, .app is also a good option
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 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 [2] https://ntldstats.com

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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.
MH15
This is definitely a problem limited to certain generations but my .codes domain doesn't get registered as a link in Snapchat.
craftkiller
Avoid the .ai TLD since it does not support DNSSEC 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.
godzillabrennus
You can always use a .ai for marketing and have a less attractive dot com for anything critical.
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".

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.

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