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Comment by _huayra_ | Hacker News Reader

Are there any "safe" gTLDs, i.e. those that are either unlikely or contractually obligated to not rent seek in a few years time?

I've been using the 'casa' gTLD (the only others I see that are relatively bargain bin are 'link', 'site', and maybe 'click').

I don't need a brand. I just need to type something in that's not the IP address of my VPS...

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> Are there any "safe" gTLDs

AFAIK there are zero guarantees. I think .com might have some pricing obligations, but all the good .coms are taken.

Don’t rely on ICANN. They’ve proven they don’t care about registrants with the .org debacle and when they let Uniregistry raise the price of domains for _existing_ registrants.

Donuts reclassifies domains to premium, but I’ve only ever seen it after a domain expires. Donuts raised some prices a few years ago, but let existing registrants keep their pricing AFAIK.

Assume there’s strength in numbers. Any attempt to increase prices drastically on .com, .net, or .org should result in a lot of backlash.

I also consider .dev and .app safe, or at least safer than the rest, because I don’t think Google is looking to turn a huge profit with them. They’re some of the most reasonably priced too.

The new TLDs could have been awesome if the registries weren’t so short sighted. They’re priced way too high to foster wide adoption. They should all be ~$10/year IMO.

Having owned many novelty TLDs, from my experience:

- TLDs with more than average marketing tend to not bring many surprises. .club, .blog, .co, .dev.

- TLDs run by companies with TLD portfolios tend to remain supported relatively as well. Donuts and Porkbun are examples.

- avoid abused TLDs such as .xyz. If a domain is sold at $0.80, that's a good sign of one. This 0.80 was registry pricing (not registrar eating costs), and companies behind them did very bad things to say the least. Alpnames for example was shut down by ICANN because if this. And you know how much ICANN doesn't care about people, judging by the .org scandal.

In my opinion, the safest ones are from your own country NIC, a generic TLD like .com or .net, or subdomains from an organization (js.org, eu.org, etc).

Donuts is a registry. Porkbun is only a registrar, right?

Porkbun is a wholly owned subsidiary of Top Level Design, which is a registry. https://toplevel.design/about-us

I recommend .dev. It’s owned by Google and a high quality domain extension (I did a lot of research before settling on it, although now I have a vested interest in its success :D).

For Google the bad PR would outweigh any benefits, so I think it’s the safest option.

However if you just want a name, .com is the best if you don’t care about a not so great name.

Lesser known fact about .dev: The registry software that runs it (and Google's other TLDs) is free and open source, and is developed in the open on GitHub: https://nomulus.foo

So if you really have thorny questions that need answering about how exactly certain complicated parts of the domain lifecycle work, you can just dive into the source.

Thanks! That’s a very interesting fact.

I was about 2 months late to someone snatching up {my last name}.dev :(

I do recommend .dev for developers if they can get a good one for their personal use / site, for the reasons you mention.

I was able to get $firstname.{dev,app}. My idea was to deploy my apps at $app.$firstname.{dev,app} for dev and prod stages respectively. Now I only need apps that I can deploy there. I am still a bit reluctant to use either one as my primary email address (still relying on .org) because I worry that certain sites will reject those fancy email addresses.

I should say that I am more attached to my first name than my last name because the former is slightly more special and thus more "unique" (also it sounds cute when people say it in English).

I'm using a .dev domain name as my primary email address and in the last few years of using it, I have only run into one website that did not support it properly. I ended up using my .com email alias for that website.

I’m sorry to hear :(

Go to Google domains, there’s an option to see all available domain endings with your chosen name, you can see if there is another that works better for you? Eg .xyz or.app etc

I went for firstname.dev :)

No, I went for https://firstname.dev

I also got https://lastname.dev too.

And lest you think you could just use your https://fullname.dev ... nope, already got it as well.

You're missing "steve.dev" on the first list - not me, though I have two steve-domains!

Reminds me of how I thought I was being clever by picking the facebook "shortname" of /forename.surename!

If you don't care about brand why do you want a gTLD? Just get somethingreallyobscure.com. It will stay cheap.

Good point. The gTLDs I listed are typically cheaper than .com registrations when I look on namecheap, but the governance of the original TLDs is definitely more regulated, except for that damn .org hijack attempt :(

However, if I want to have {my last name}.tld, is there any gTLD that would be unlikely to jack up the price? I actually have {my last name}.casa for this reason.

Unfortunately {my last name}.{com,org,net} were all registered when I was in diapers. I'm assuming that the land of gTLDs is the wild west of potential price shenanigans, but I'm wondering if I'm wrong.

A .com will cost < $100 for 10 years at most registrars and as you've noted, this is for personal use (not company branding, e.g.) so the name is not that important. I'll posit that most folks know how bad the name squatting business is around the internet and nobody really thinks hard about somethingreallyobscure.com so long as it's not confrontational in some way (religion, politics, swearing, etc.). But I will say "anything ending in .com has more implicit trust" - I'm always mentally questioning if any link from one of the new gTLDs is just a spammer/ne'er do well.

Been here, done what you're doing, there's a .com out there with a fun and interesting name which somehow resonates with your personality. Think long term - avoid trademark/copyright branded words in the name, avoid being too narrow in case your hobby changes, easy to type and spend some time really thinking about plurality - I've discarded a lot of ideas simply because it would lead to other people going "was that with or without an (s) on the end?" - same with double-letters in the middle, just avoid them. I try and focus on 5-6 syllables max which break on natural language barriers (English).

If you are in the EU (resident or business), you can legally buy a country level TLD from any member state. I have a 4 letter domain I use specifically for this (for internal stuff, so I can get SSL certs).

I think .de is relatively safe.

Yes it is (and cheap!), but I think one needs to be a resident of (or business in) Germany for it. .eu is also cheap, but similar rules apply.

> but I think one needs to be a resident of (or business in) Germany for it.

Not quite, you just need somebody acting as a local point of contact, and a number of registrars will offer this as an additional service for a small fee.

That's probably because we have things like a mandatory imprint here in Germany.

https://www.opennic.org might be useful to you.

No, that really isn't helpful unless you want a novelty domain name that nobody else (roughly speaking) can resolve. (And which, as a result, you can't send or receive email from, obtain an SSL certificate for, get indexed by search engines, etc.)

I still think it might meet OP's requirements: "I just need to type something in that's not the IP address of my VPS".

Sure, there might be other requirements, and it's not clear what the exact use case is, but it also might be useful.

I mean, if your only requirement is "I need it to work on computers that I've specifically configured to make it work on", you might as well make your "domain" an entry in /etc/hosts. It'd even work more reliably.

For sure there are also other use cases, where just putting entries in /etc/hosts is not enough and it's useful to add one more entry to DNS resolver on machines that should be able to reach specific and probably dynamic destinations.

That's actually a fun exercise to come up with these use cases.

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