Best new startup TLD, other than .com?

OP: please don't say 'just get dot com'

All comments: 'just get dot com'

I had the same question and went with .co. I think .io is falling in popularity due to dns scandal. More and more people are using .dev now and .ai is also ok.

Problem with .co is people tend to assume it's a typo outside of tech (eg my bank).

A lot of startups I follow moved to .com after a few years so I assume there are more pain points that I haven't discovered yet.

My intuition for ranking is something like

.co

.dev

.ai

.io

But would love to see data on trends by company size etc if anyone has.

I did a bit of digging around to see some data around TLDs and one of the top hits seems to be Hosting Tribunal[0]. Some interesting stats :

The top 4 gTLDs seem to be .com, .org, .net, .co. dot com clearly won't make the cut for you but have you considered .net?

Interestingly, [1] led to https://ntldstats.com and this has a nicer graph based data. I found that .xyz has a 9.3% market share overall which is interesting as well.

[1] https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/tld-statistics/#gref [2] https://ntldstats.com

A better question might be what TLDs not to use.

Based on the contact form spam, my sites receive, don’t get .xyz, .site, and .online. I am sure, there are others like me, who block these TLDs.

Also, don’t get a region TLD, if you are not planning to serve that region.

Avoid the .ai TLD since it does not support DNSSEC http://stats.research.icann.org/dns/tld_report/ . Even if you don't care about DNSSEC, your clients will and it will come up in security reviews.

I just made this decision for my own project. After a lot of hand-wringing I decided that the name of the project doesn't matter very much compared to the ease of having a .com domain name, so I picked a project name based on availability of the .com domain instead of the other way around.

I used to favor .io, now I like .dev or .sh. .ai if appropriate. Never really liked .co (too close to .com).

Use .xyz domain. Once your startup becomes successful you can buy your tld of choice.

.com is sufficient if you have a good name. Also, the DNS resolvers for .com tend to be quite good.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/bunnycdn.com/blog/is-your-fancy...

Also, .com is easy to share via word of mouth. It's more work to say "yeah it's salt, then dot ly" than "salty dot com".

my list goes from best to worst:

.com

.io

.fyi

.co

.net

.xyz i have not seen anything noteworthy on other than personal sites.

i feel like .fyi is going to blow up in the next 10 years. there are TONS of good .fyi domains available and they are typically arount $8 to register as opposed to the $34 .io domains.

It's worth noting that if you go with a less known TLD, some websites will not recognize your email as valid. I use .world and have had to use my Gmail as backup for signing up for things.

It doesn't matter? Either get .com or get literally anything else.

If you absolutely must, I would go for a well-recognized ccTLD like .AI or .IO or .CO. Avoid all the new gTLDs like the plague.

If it's a commercial endeavor, I would urge you to get a dotcom and get creative with the name. A long-ugly-hyphenated-domain.com would be taken more seriously than a short LLL.WEBSITE or LLL.BLUE or whatever.