YC startups are abandoning .com | Hacker News Reader

YC startups are abandoning .com

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> YC startups are abandoning .com

They are not "abandoning" .com domains. They are just really hard to find available or cheap enough to buy, so they launch with something else instead!

.com will always be king

Bingo. either you bough a .com a while ago or you have to pay a lot.

A while ago we had the .ly domains. Now .ai. Things change depending on "fashion" if you can call it that.

Oh god my company just switched to .io and that was a huge PITA. I hope we don't go .ai...

You just switched to .io knowing that it might be decommissioned in the not-too-distant future?

Perhaps they finally finished their migration off .su

It would shock me if that domain were actually allowed to be killed off by pure bureaucracy. I would like to believe that at some point bureaucracy must give way to concerns for the humans it serves, and if nothing else there is enough money involved with the industry that uses it that they'll probably be able to lobby effectively, one way or another.

wait what? I know nothing about this.

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2024/10/10/the-io-domai... is a reasonable summary.

Maybe. Still wild to find startups getting millions can’t afford to buy a .com domain

it's not that they can't afford to buy one. it's that they're not available. and now a lot of other tlds have gained traction so it's now reasonable to consider others.

I would assume that for most foo.ai domains, foo-ai.com would also be available. So it’s more about naming preferences, and sometimes lack of imagination for coming up with an available name.

foo-ai.com looks like a phishing domain targeting foo.ai

A hyphen in a URL is a non-starter.

"non-starter"? In a URL? You mean URLs and not domain names? Why are these "non-starters"? What is special or wrong about hyphens? Do you avoid clicking these for moral reasons? You do understand that they are perfectly legal anywhere, and acceptable in the character set by all RFCs? What makes them so odious to you?

The squatters really jack up the prices. Yet somehow they pay pennies to squat on domains for decades. It's really a scandal.

Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded.

Agreed, this is just a way to save cash until it makes sense to buy the actual desired tld .com from the current owner

Which gTLDs are reliable besides the classics (com, net, org,...)? By that I mean that the TLD owner won't screw you over a few years from now, for example by raising prices?

I kind of like the idea to use .com for the marketing site, and .app for the actual web-app.

"A recent YC startup spent 250k on a domain. I was slightly shocked. But when I asked how much they raised after YC, the answer was 6.5m. So 1/26 of their round. This is the time we live in; one shocking number counterbalances the other."

https://x.com/paulg/status/2083628660708561075

Was that a .xyz?

If you take .ai out of it, .com is still dominant.

Exactly, and nothing will ever match the "prestige" of .com

.ai is also kind of cool right now but it will probably lose its appeal after some years when everything will become AI and the world will get tired of the term.

But .com is still at the top of the food chain. If you can survive for a few years, raise your series A/B, you will likely have enough money to acquire your sexy single-word .com name.

Just found out the great ol’ command.com is taken by somebody random

Many of the “good” simple names were grabbed by folks when registration was free in th 90s.

I’m still annoyed that thanks to a missed payment, I lost quixote.com.

These vanity ccTLDs are crazy to me. ".ai" is a fake gTLD. I bet that many users and possibly even some admins do not understand that it belongs to a tiny island nation.

For years, Twitter used ".ly" and it was not widely known that this belonged, ultimately, to Libya. The other ccTLDs, such as .io and .co, have certain "nerd cachet" and people think the occupants are cool, until the rug is pulled and they need to reckon with the fact that all registrants were actually cybersquatters and victims of rampant capitalism.

My advice to any startup that can't get a .com, is to find a legitimate gTLD that you can occupy. Even ".us" is available to anyone in the USA. I do not understand the shame, or reluctance, to occupy space in ".us". Why is it so rare? Do you hate America? Seriously, do you hate her so much, you can't live here with her in cyberspace?

If you choose a ccTLD and you become attached to it, or your customers become attached to it, or your software is attached to it, someday you will need to face the music when Genovia is invaded, or transfers its sovereignty to someone who wants to enforce Genovian supremacy on the Internet.

Is non .com/.org, and hyphens still haram? I registered a new domain last week; I went with non-hyphenated .com. More verbose than ideal, but I chose based on my previous understanding.

I remember .ly was a thing for a while, then the tech companies would do *ly.com instead.

.com — in RFC 920, it originally meant 'commercial.' But come to think of it, a lot of recent startups seem to be selling things that aren't really commercial at all. So maybe they're actually heading in the right direction.

.ai is the new .io but nothing will beat .com. Even Paul Graham has said that.

Lest we forget, the PG essay: https://paulgraham.com/name.html

While reading the essay, I could not stop thinking about the literal "X" company which was formerly known as Twitter :D. It's like X is no longer a variable but a constant.

They will certainly buy the .com once they reach a certain level of stability.

it will be much more expensive by then.

.com is evergreen but it's more and more difficult to get good .com names

I wouldn't call this 'abandoning .com' though

it's basically still .com dominated with a good chunk .ai

and I guess the ones with good .com are keeping the .com

.st is cool because they allow US-legal content and it's pretty cheap. I don't think it will be popular with companies but I like it for personal sites.

Oh, they allow US-legal content, do they?

Can you name some domains that do not?

What makes "US-legal content" particularly cool to you?

>Oh, they allow US-legal content, do they?

I've heard this, yes.

>Can you name some domains that do not?

.md disallows pornographic content.

I assume many other tlds would take you offline at government request for content against their government. Or just for any inconvenience to themselves

>What makes "US-legal content" particularly cool to you?

This resonates:

>>knowing content far worse than I'd ever be willing to host is allowed, provides me a certain level of ease.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260722120624/https://crippled....

At the end of the day, .com will still remain the most valuable and all startups will grow up into buying a .com

Counter-example: Alphabet doesn't have alphabet.com

They have abc.xyz

Who ever has alphabet.com will be able to sell it for 7 figures anyway, which is the point.

TIL that alphabet.com belongs to BMW group

Counter-counter point: It's not really used in branding either by any of the child companies. So they don't need it.

They have google.com, which is the brand they use towards customers. The Alphabet brand is little more than a stock ticker.

They use abc.xyz though, which is fun at least.

I thought .dev and .app would be more popular actually. The rapid increase in .ai makes sense though.

From personal experience .dev is a little weird. For one thing its on the HSTS preload list, enforcing https. You cannot make a http://... request to a .dev domain from most browsers. I found this out the hard way after trying to use .dev for... development.

I understand using http on localhost and in some cases local domains accessible within the LAN. But I don't see much point in using http for public domains, especially since browsers apply many restrictions to insecure origins (http://*.localhost is considered secure).

That's a deal breaker for me. Who has the time to set up full crypto protocols when just noodling around?

why not use localhost which most browsers have no issues validating? .dev being on HSTS is a positive imo

I never thought domains are actually uper important for startups. .com was always cool, then ther was an .io madness, never liked it, still go with .com or .co

Anything other than a .com for a commercial site screams gimmick and immediately strips away most of its credibility. Go .com or go home.

this sounds like you're stuck in 2010.

Nope: it surprised me too, but we did a small survey and unless you’re a nerd, anything not ending in either com or your own nation’s TLD structure is considered dodgy and/or hard to type (.co being a notorious case — people type .com instead).

This is mitigated slightly by the fact that people don’t use URIs much any more and even if they do they usually type something into a search bar or chat bot which DWIMs what they typed anyway.

Fictitious company names and URLs follow...

I once worked for a U.S.-based company called Doe Products, Inc., which it commonly abbreviated as "DPI." When the web started becoming relevant, DPI hadn't managed to get either doe.com or dpi.com so, instead, it got dpi-doeprducts.com. All of this happened before I arrived and began handling DPI's website-/domains-related stuff. I always chafed at that unwieldy URL, especially due to its often-problematic hyphen, so I was happy when we did manage to get doe.us. However, the execs soon quashed that satisfaction when they told me, no, we can't use that URL because people will think they have to type "doe.us.com" (!?!); and I never managed to convince them otherwise.

Indeed, the standard domain I use for my mail is family-name.org. And so many people do try familyname.org.com that when I have to give my mail address over the phone or in a shop I just say familyname.com

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