I'll add another reason: People will mistakenly go to <yourname>.com in droves, regardless of how easy it is to remember or how clever the domain/TLD split is. Having a cute short url is trendy, but it doesn't mean you can avoid the .com if you actually want people to find your site reliably.
I'll also add that visiting http://voo.st/ is giving a "Domain Available" page for me. Completely inexcusable that their error state is advertising for someone to buy your domain.
It's still better to have the .com anyways, because then you aren't potentially competing on SEO with someone else with the same brand name and a "better" domain to use it with. Like it or not, .com domains are the de facto namespace for consumer-facing products and having the .com for your brand up for sale or already taken is just asking for problems.
* Getting a better brand with a wacky .com name ("getxyz.com")
* Getting a better brand with an "exotic" extension
* Spending a ton of money
The exotic extension seemed the least sucky option at the time. I'm not sure that "voostapp.com" (or whatnot) is more easily found than "voo.st", it's still a trip to google.
The big surprise (to me) is that NICs can fail so spectacularly. I really didn't expect this. It might have changed our decision a year ago... but we're pretty much stuck with it now.
This is still true today, but has been becoming less and less true for years now. The .com namespace just isn't big enough.
Today we're mostly just dealing with it - I suspect I'm somewhat more protected here in Australia than most US based people - many of my clients are fine with a $foo.com.au domain even if the $foo.com isn't available, so long as $foo.com isn't already a direct competitor.
The pool of available .com domains just isn't going to support all the things people want to do with domain names in the short and medium term future. Something is going to have to change - and whatever that change is, it's somehow going to have to avoid the problem of all the .com domain owners immediately registering the .newtld version or fraudulently/incorrectly using trademark law to muscle out new businesses.
While some insist that simply having a .edu domain, regardless of the site’s quality, content, and incoming links, will give you more weight with the major search engines, it’s just not true. Who says so? Matt Cutt, a top engineer at Google, in this video.[1][2]
and
Sadly this whole engagement is based on a faulty assumption: It is not the Edu-toplevel domain which gives universities such a high relevance in Google for their references but the backlink-structure of the domains themselves. Universities have the advantage that on one hand, in most cases they have had online representations for a long time (stanford.edu for example was registered 1985) and on the other hand they have lots of content which was and is linked voluntarily. This is a long time to (unconsciously) build a “great” backlink-structure in Google's point of view.[3]
Hopefully that addresses your second point, too:
I wouldn't be surprised if .com's did as well but I've never had that confirmed
You should be astonished if they did.
Having said that, some early naive autocomplete implementations in browser address bars bias .com over other extensions. I'm not sure anyone has ever measured the impact of this.
I don't know that there is one, I just meant "better" from a branding perspective. Interesting question though, I'd love to know if there was TLD-specific bumps.
Ah, gotcha. That's a branding advantage that disappears a little more every year as consumers get more internet savvy, but it's certainly still a factor.
Yeah. Also, if your TLD belongs to somewhere with a less than stable government, who knows if they'll just stop caring about you.
And, a portion of your users will always try to go to whatever.com instead of whatev.er, the worst part is you have no idea how many, but the guy that's parked the domain probably does. As you grow your business, traffic to the .com domain will only increase, you'll eventually want to buy it but whoever owns it will know they've got your balls in a vice, and you'll have no idea if it's even worth it (except by their word).
It's fine for certain types of businesses (especially those consumed by machines or the people who love them). Sites with eyes for mass appeal should probably try to come up with a memorable-yet-unique .com.
Does anyone know what sort of money that cost them?
I suspect some domaineer was very happy that day…
(we blew $11k for the .com version of a .com.au domain we'd started to succeed with 6 or 7 years back. Ultimately futile, but not really related to that expense…)
"Ask HN" means no links, no images, no formatting. Good for a quick question, bad for exposition.
I think the "Discuss this on Hacker News" phenomenon reflects that while HN is a great community and discussion forum, it's a terrible publishing medium. Probably by design.
I was reading this about an hour ago thinking that I was glad I had gone for the .com and that this sort of thing wouldn't effect me.
However, I just found out that my mail provider (25mail.st) is failing for the same reason. My app now has no incoming/outgoing email. This is isn't the end of the world, but a bit frustrating none-the-less.
I guess the lesson here is to beware of both cutesy two-letter TLD's for your domain name and cutesy two-letter TLD's the in the domain names of the mission critical services which you subscribe to.
Why is it that halfway down the page, while I'm getting into the meat of the post, a banner pops down from the top blocking the text I'm reading? I like to keep my current line right at the top of the page, so I have to scroll back up. Then it disappears! Frustrating.
Service and Support Technical and General Affairs Office
hours: 08:00 to 18:00, Front-hour on-call, 24/7 as an option Tel: 08-555771 55 Fax: 08-555 771 99 Mail: support@bahnhof.se
Sales
Questions regarding contracts and RFPs.
Hours: 9:00 a.m. to 17:00
Tel: 08-555771 50
Fax: 08-555771 99
Mail: sales@bahnhof.se
Buy voostapp.com, point it at your servers, and tweet about it (or use some other form of out-of-band communication) while you let people know you're working on it.
It's a long shot, but you could try calling the CEO,
Jon Karlung
Phone: +46 (0)761 110160 (this is a cell phone, so there is a chance he's not away from it even though the time is closing in on 1 AM over here)
Alternatively, same reasoning with the CEO of Bahnhof Unipessoal Lda:
Johnny Aspman
Phone: +46 (0) 76 111 01 02
I hope you will get help sorting this out as soon as possible, but I would add that unless you signed up for 24/7 duty service, I don't think you are being quite fair to the provider; so far you are getting exactly what they declared you would: Phone support 08:00-18:00 CEST, weekdays.
With ICANN opening up .[anything] to the highest bidders this kind of situation is only going to get worse. Stick with the global TLDs and the major (stable) country codes.
That is definitely different. I understand the catchy headline and the grouping together of newer tlds but it's unfair.
The headline should have read "do at least a modicum of research into a company you are about to tie your entire brand to before you do so".
This doesn't apply to a lot of "cutesy" two letter tlds and it does apply to a lot of things that aren't tlds (whatever fly-by-night/about to get aqui-hired SAAS startups you are considering using as core pieces of your business)
There's going to be a point where it'll be impossible for new businesses to choose a domain name that isn't abstracted so far away from their business name as all the domains are taken. I'm curious as to the what the system will be like in 5 years. Surely .com can't be king forever?
We already thought of this problem - we said "hey, there'll be different companies with the same name; we should introduce different namespaces so that, say, a company in Australia and a company in Austria don't clash.
Turns out, end-users want a flat namespace, so everybody has to buy names in that namespace. Until ICANN opens up the top-level domain space to arbitrary registrations (instead of the current 'you have to spend $150,000 and run a registrar' deal), that flat namespace is probably going to be .com.
There is no quality control in the ICANN root. You grease some palms and you're in. .pw?
The situation will get much worse if the new gtld program is allowed to proceed.
Read up on the lawsuit that ICANN is in with Manwin, a porn company. The courts are getting closer to lifting the veil on ICANN, who has long claimed they cannot be sued as a commercial entity.
Considering they just banked over 350 million for giving people the right to be reviewed by ICANN (for what?), this idea of being a "non-profit" organization and immune from any commercial liability is becoming a bit of a farce, even to the most naive observer.
I'll also add that visiting http://voo.st/ is giving a "Domain Available" page for me. Completely inexcusable that their error state is advertising for someone to buy your domain.