Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

And to add to all of that: If you register a local version of any domain, be it .ly or anything else make sure that you understand that domains registered as such are subject to both local laws and the whims of the TLD authority.

This is one of the reasons I've always stuck to .com, .net and .org, just registering a .nl domain for example requires me to jump through all kinds of hoops, and is more expensive to boot.

If you're registering a cutesy domain name because it worked for del.icio.us please note that they eventually switched to the whole word. If you're doing it because 'there are no good names available' then you need to get a bit more inspiration somewhere, I've found it very easy to come up with domain names up to last week, I can't imagine the situation has changed much since then.

View on HN

+1. One of my previous companies had a .jo domain (Jordan). One day some Jordanian internet agency had a major outage, and the entire .jo root DNS went offline. We had a 24 hour outage we were completely powerless to resolve. (Maybe we could have dived into the non-authoritative DNS servers and set really long TTLs or something.)

I tried calling up the Jordanian firm that sells cutesy domain puns to Western companies, and after half an hour listening to hold music on an international line, I was told that nobody could talk to me because it was a holiday, and they would look into it tomorrow.

Couldn't agree more. If the .com is not available DON'T DO IT!

I heard about http://wordoid.com/ here on HN -- it's a wonderful little webapp that lets you generate domain names that "sound natural" in a select list of languages and that (optionally) contain specific words.

In the "more options" you can filter out domains where both .com and .net are unavailable (it would be better to just filter unavailable .coms but it still saves a lot of time).

I think that this advice only applies to commercial sites. I have several personal domains such as Richard.sDoma.in and Richard.sMyNa.me which are far superior to any .com domain name.

Personal users are only just starting to get into having a personal URL to hosting their own id and blog etc. and with over 2 billion internet users and only around 140million registered domains, I think attitudes will change quickly. At least for the personal user.

Despite it being shorter, it seems more awkward to type and sometimes seems more prone to error. Not to mention how it might affect your standing with search engines.

Remember when http://delicious.com was http://del.icio.us When I first saw the product, I thought the name was "icio".

Couldn't agree more. I found it awkward to type—I could never remember what part of the word 'delicious' was the domain. deli.cio.us? de.licio.us?

This is why people just go to Google and type in the domain they want. If you're off by a character or two you still get to the site without a 404.

for what it's worth, delicious was del.icio.us for 4 years and only became delicious.com 2 years after yahoo bought the site for many millions of dollars.

I totally disagree, based on my experience of using semantici.st for my blog and email.

Especially for personal domains, you're going to want to tell them to people. 'Just email me, my address is whatever at richard dot s d o m a dot in.'

It's a huge chore and confuses people. These things are fine when written down, but become unworkable when you decide to go outside and interact with people. (And I don't mean that in a snarky sense - that's exactly the experience I had. It was fine while I was being reclusive and hiding in my study, but when I realised I needed to interact with other living humans outside, it's a liability.)

What makes .com the best domain is CTRL+Enter: .com is the default TLD; it's like having no TLD at all.

All other TLDs, including .net, .org, .yourOwnCountry, .someExoticCountry are bad because they have to be mentioned.

Totally disagree! I own a short .biz domain (erica.biz) and have had people mis-speak it when introducing me as "ericabiz.com"...so much so that I put in a backorder on ericabiz.com and when the previous registrant finally let it drop this year, I snagged it and 301'ed it to erica.biz.

I still love erica.biz and have no intentions of switching over to a .com, but there's no question that people assume you have a .com.

Search engines, however, don't care--my site happily gets tens of thousands of visitors per month from Google et.al. and the site ranks well for some very high-volume keywords.

a lot of people see .biz as a really spammy-sounding tld. i wouldn't advise any company to use it as their primary domain name.

I had one of the first .biz domains in 2001 and used it to run a 7-figure business. Back then, it was far less accepted than it is now. My blog is doing fine, too (and I get tons of compliments on the domain name!)

My point is, it sure didn't stop my company from getting hundreds of happy customers, some of whom paid us more than $10,000 per month.

> registering a .nl domain for example requires me to jump through all kinds of hoops, and is more expensive to boot

This is quite interesting, because in Germany we have the exact opposite. Here, .de domains are preferable to .com/.net/.org, because .de domains are cheaper, registered more quickly with less bureaucracy and provide better data privacy for the domain holder.

In nl the TLD admin is called SIDN, which officially stands for Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland, but the situation was/is so bad that they got the nickname Stichting Internet Dominatie Nederland which stands for something entirely different.

How it can be 'more quickly' then typing in a name in a form and clicking a mouse is a mystery to me, what do you mean by that?

'more quickly' probably means that german domain registrators can directly register .de domain (and send you an invoice for it, not bill your credit card), while they use some middle-man for generic TLDs. This can cause various unexpected problems.

I own both a German .de as well as a .nl from the Netherlands and the hoops I had to jump to get the German domain was insane while the .nl took the same effort as registering a standard .com for me.

What "hoops" are you talking about? The domain holder doesn't even have to specify an email address or telephone number (in contrast to .com), and the domains are usually registered within less than a minute.

Possibly. I'm not sure if I have more trust in Verisign (which was willing to put wildcard records into .com TLD (a long time ago, yes, but…)) or the local cz.NIC, as an association of czech ISPs and registrars with open policies and membership.

Verisign is a complete pain in the butt, a company that should have been taken to the cleaners long ago. But I don't deal with them directly (though they keep trying) but through my registrar, like most people.

Verisign once upon a time actually was a half decent company but then they got greedy and started screwing people over.

Verisign once upon a time actually was a half decent company

When was that? Network Solutions never gave good value. When NSF privatized domain registration in 1993, they paid NSI $6M to run it for two years; it couldn't've cost anywhere near that much. They were supposed to set up a more efficient ordering system (developing it was part of the $6M deal), but didn't. They couldn't be held to the terms of the deal, though, because the NSF had set it up as a cooperative agreement, rather than a contract, so that they could evade government procurement rules.

Here's how bad their early service was. In 1996, I was considering giving my dad ourlastname.com for Christmas. I emailed an ISP local to him, to ask if they could host the domain for him. I then decided it was a bad idea (giving somebody something that takes work); but, before I contacted them again, I got a bill from Network Solutions for the domain name. (It was misspelled, too, but that was probably the ISP's fault.) I told NSI it was a mistake, that I hadn't authorized it, but they told me I couldn't cancel the registration; only the ISP could do so. The argument that person A should not be able to incur charges for person B didn't cut any ice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com