Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name
blorn.com
blorn.com
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.
I know .edu's get a bump and I wouldn't be surprised if .com's did as well but I've never had that confirmed.
No they don't.
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.
[1] http://www.searchenginejournal.com/truth-about-edu-domains-r...
[2] The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EE163OGjfo&feature=gv
[3] http://www.sistrix.com/blog/751-the-.edu-domain-myth.html
* Getting an inferior .com domain/brand
* 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.
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.
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.
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…)
If you're writing an HN-centric post, it surely stands to reason it should be an Ask-HN article, right?
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.
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.
Update: Over 8 hours of downtime later, dns is delegating properly again. Voost is back up.
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
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.
Good luck!
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)
It's very hard to understand how services operate until there is a failure?
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.
I'd argue that both of those conditions are no longer unambiguously true.
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.