How to know which TLDs are “safe”?
I've been looking to register a new domain and while all the good stuff is taken on the popular TLDs like .com and many others, there are a lot of great lesser-used TLDs that seem attractive, but I don't know how to gauge the safety/security/durability of these as I think I've read that there are different owners/systems for different TLDs (Google is often mentioned here as an "owner" of some that it uses for questionable purposes). Is there a way to get some accurate and easy-to-interpret info on if a TLD is "ok" (for lack of a better word) ?
I was burned years ago by an attractive TLD where its owners raised the yearly renewals to like $150 from the original $30 without anything I could do about it, so I had to either give it up (which I did) or just eat the fees. So I'd like to know which TLDs are also immune to that sort of thing.
I suppose I could just buy a TLD and register it for like a decade to avoid price hikes in the short term.
I never renew domains. I just let them expire after a year and register a new one in its place. The web is ephemeral in nature anyway and that's why I do it. Then you have the ten-year time window limit to deal with, and who even knows if your registrar will be around by then.
domain names are almost not immune to that sort of thing: price hikes. only way is to buy for 10years . and, in most cases, that hikes up the price for you on day one.
I like .net, at least for my personal stuff.