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Ask HN: What TLD do you use for your personal site and email?

3 points by buttsex ↗ HN
I'm in the process of moving away from my gmail account and would like a personal domain for my email and website. I already own firstnamelastname.com, the problem is that my first and last name together are really long and I'd like something shorter, for email especially (i.e. me@lastname.com). I'm thinking of getting lastname.co since lastname.com is taken and the guy won't give it up (funny since lastname.com was registered in Colombia and I think he's Colombian). My last name is short so it looks nice. I could come up with some hacky domain names but I like the simplicity of lastname.co

In this day and age, is there any downside to owning a .co TLD (besides typos). I plan to use me@lastname.co for email and I'd like to make some aliases for different services (dropbox@lastname.co, contests@lastname.co). I would host a small blog at the domain name, I don't really promote myself too much, and if you Google my name it would come up at the top any way.

What do you guys use?

10 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 40.1 ms ] thread
sogen
.me seems to be somewhat popular.

what about .net?

nice username btw

emsy
I use an .email TLD. Quite long and most people don't know it yet but for dedicated email usage it fits quite well.
jordsmi
Only problem I've seen with these newer TLD's is sometimes on shittier made sites they deny it as being a valid email. Heck, even my .me domain gets denied as being a valid email and that's been around for awhile now.
emsy
I've never noticed it, because I use free email services for registrations. My .email address is for professional and personal use.
hashtag
These days I am moving away from anything that isn't a .com. I have a couple domains that I think are other TLD for legacy reasons but trying hard not to buy anything that isn't a .com generally
gregcohn
Our company name is a .co. It is generally fine but does lead to some email going astray as people, either out of habit, assumption, or auto-correct, occasionally address it to the .com variant.
jordsmi
Currently have a .me for my personal email but am switching to a .com soon.

For which TLD to choose, it really depends on the use case. For just personal email, or if your site is catered to more tech people you can really use anything. If it is being used more for the public I'd be careful because many people don't know things past .com or .net

I often get .co for sites and it usually works fine, but sometimes I've seen non tech savvy people mistake it as a typo and send emails to the .com version

bramgg
I use the .gg TLD. My personal site is bram.gg and my email is hello@bram.gg

.gg is my favorite TLD, and the most underrated. It's expensive enough that the domain you want probably isn't taken, but cheap enough that it's worth the price if it's something you care about. "gg" is also a common phrase in gaming subculture, meaning "good game".

Quick plug, if you're looking for a quick and fun domain for your personal email, check out my open source project Hipster Domain Finder[0]. You can use it to find some pretty awesome short domain hacks and it even allows you to sort by TLD.

[0] http://www.hipsterdomainfinder.com

pzxc
I use .US for email, because it's on of the cheapest TLDs possible. I have a couple really short .US domains but since .US is geotargeted by google, it doesn't work well for a website, but works great for email
chrisBob
My dad has setup email forwarding for the whole family as firstname@lastname.org. The .org is easy to explain and I think it suits a personal email well.