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Comment by nariman | Hacker News Reader

We're back online at http://candid.io. Someone on twitter posted "VCs should think twice before investing in startups without a .com" -> I think that's patently absurd. Azure, AWS, and the other 'core infrastructure' services suffer similar outages form time to time.

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I hate genericized ccTLDs, but I don't think the VCs are the ones who should be avoiding them. People creating services should stick to .com, get the .net, and if they have to do something like "getdropbox.com" until they can buy dropbox.com, so be it.

Going from dropbox.io to dropbox.com is ok, but I'd probably go for getdropbox.com in preference to dropbox.io.

Well as a person hosting a service under a .io domain I must say that it's next to impossible to find a decent domain under .com these days. They are all taken by domain sharks hoarding away and running link-farms. The .io landscape is a refreshing one, it's well recognized by it's typical audience (tech people), expensive enough so that it's not attractive for the domain-sharks, and there's plenty available.

Why exactly do you hate them?

1) Once you're successful you have to get the .com/.net/etc anyway. There's a lot of ambiguouty when you say "go to my site, de.lici.o.us" (which was probably the dumbest one ever), but even saying "referly" makes me think "referly.com" more than "refer.ly". If you're going to get the gccTLD, you absolutely must have sitenameio.com too. So, it doesn't really save you from "decent domain not available" -- prefixing with "get" or "my" in .com isn't any worse.

2) ccTLD has a defined meaning -- it's the country. I don't hate ccTLDs; e.g. Amazon.co.uk makes a lot of sense for the UK site of Amazon. But when people

3) They expose you to additional risk. The US can largely shut down most things, but .ly means you're exposed to Libya (JFC! an internet business voluntarily deciding to be exposed to Libya?)

4) If you really want something other than .com, you could use another TLD. Generally they all tend to be scams (I'm not aware of many .info or .biz domain names which are anything but scams, although I guess a few single-purpose/serving sites are in .info)

In fairness, IO is actually the least objectionable of all the gccTLDs, since "IO" is a pretty bogus ISO code in terms of representing a country.

ccTLDs make sense when you want to "fly the flag" of that country, too -- wikileaks.is or wikileaks.ch makes sense. All the gccTLDs have policies which are strictly worse than .com though.

And 2-letter domains (which are mostly ccTLDs) do make sense for link shorteners, particularly temporary/transient ones.

I like .info for personal point of presence sites.. I use tracker1.info as an example.

I also do like .io for previously stated reasons by others... It's techie/geeky (I/O), and it's expensive enough that the squatters have mostly stayed away.

When is the last time you heard of the .com infrastructure failing across the board?

Just because you're exposed to some reliability risk doesn't mean that you can't expose yourself to more by using a smaller TLD.

Yes, you're taking on a bit more risk in the short-term... but everything's a trade-off, you're getting much back for a slightly elevated risk in having a short, concise, very meaningful (in our case) name that influences adoption. There's no other alternative -> .COM is a limited resource, only reasonable assumption is that reliability of other TLDs must improve in the long run.

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