What TLDs do you view the most positively?
I'm thinking of registering a new domain to host a personal blog and a few other pages that is somewhat separate from my current personal portfolio page, as the blog will likely not be directly relevant to my work. But since this is a more personal project, I want to branch out in terms of TLDs - I've previously used exclusively .com endings as they lead to the least confusion and are the most accepted.
I'm a little overwhelmed by the number of options these days, so I wanted to take a little straw poll to see which ones people think are the best. The name itself will be my initials "gpxl", and the endings I am considering are
- .info
- .xyz
- .fyi
- .computer
- .me
But I'm curious to see what others think. I would go with .xyz but I feel like then my domain name becomes an unintelligble string of letters - gpxl.xyz, so I'm wondering what others think and what arguments exist for choosing one over another.
P.S. If anyone has recommendations for registars I'm open to those too. Currently using google domains but open to switching.
Since you are looking for recommendations: Use gandi as registrar. They support almost every single tld and are a pretty ethical company.
Seconded, I've had a great experience with gandi.
If it's a personal site, it really doesn't matter. Go over those domain-specific TLDs if you want. Are you writing a blog? Then .blog works for you. Are you selling your assassination skills? go .ninja.
But if you are looking to commercialize your website in any way, just go .com. Old people know .com, and you're not going to lose business with domain confusion.
Yeah if there's money it should be .com (or a country tld like .ca, .co.uk etc)
I like .net personally.
.net would have been one of my first choices, but unfortunately it is already registered. Hence I started looking at some of the newer options.
Me too. Managed to snag a 4-letter one a while back for my blog: https://jcdl.net
.net gang rise up! Love .net. @gpl -- sucks it's already taken for you!
maybe .org? That's another of the OG TLDs, it is universally identifiable as a domain.
As a cranky old-ish person, I prefer the top-level domain to reflect the contents of your site. If you're commercial; .com, if you're an organisation; .org, etc.
Only pick if your blog is for providing information to the general public. (As a side-note, I personally don't trust sites using .info, because it's so often used by scammers and malicious websites.)
Fine for general purpose blogs I guess. It's pretty cool actually.
"For Your Information", also only pick if your blog is for informing the general public. Also I think one sounds more snarky than .info.
Only pick this one if your blog is about computers.
Of your suggestions, I'd probably go with this one for a general-purpose personal blog.
Someone else suggested .blog, which might be the most informative top-level domain for a personal blog.
For my own personal domain, I went with my country's TLD (.no), but I don't actually use the web site; I just wanted a personalised email address, and for that you'll want something everyone is familiar with. Someone else mentioned the .co/.com confusion for example.
Just to add some info:
.meis the country code TLD for Montenegro. Nothing wrong with that, just worth noting.for personal sites:
.email
.website
.me
.com
I'm also using google domains, very happy with them as a registrar. Good features and pricing.
Protip: grab your name's .email and .website while you can, they are still in fairly low demand. I'm fortunate that my name is relatively uncommon. Also lucky my last name starts with an "s", really works out nice.
Here's my super unfinished personal site: https://blakes.email
I really like the simplicity of your site, I'm hoping to replicate something similar.
I like the idea of grabbing .email and .website domains. I'm trying to switch to using mostly my initials as my online identifier, so I might see if those are still open. Unfortunately my initials are also the initials of a very popular free software license so I don't have the best luck there.
Thanks! I just borrowed a template and tweaked it a little. I haven't done any webdev in like ten years, so I just tweak HTML. I wanted it to be fast, easy to read, and super simple.
Haha! Yeah GPL may be a little difficult to get domains for. That, and three-letter domains are always in high demand. Hope you find something that works for you!
I was really lucky and bought my <firstname><lastname>.com last year. Now I use it for my primary email (me@<firstname><lastname>.com) and it's fun occasionally getting reactions from it.
Same!
I got my <lastname>.email so that's fun. I like to give out <firstname>@<lastname>.email I think it's awesome.
Haven't thought to use the me@ setup yet, that's a good idea.
I grabbed my name.com address last year too and have a totally unfinished Wordpress site set up on it... Any tips on setting up your own email address using the domain name? Total noob here...
You can either run a mail server, or forward your MX (mail exchange) records to a company to handle that for you. Typically this will be a paid service.
Some common examples are GSuite, Office365, and Zoho. Note that these often include other suites of software, but you can choose to use them for only mail purposes if you prefer.
If you self-host, your expected experience will include spam, blacklisting issues, and then an expletive-filled research expedition into things like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and Forward-confirmed reverse DNS.
If you let somebody else handle email, you'll probably have to pay for a light business plan. If you don't mind using their web app, Zoho is a decent free option. Maybe others can recommend free and non-terrible options in this space though.
While I generally prefer open-source solutions when available, I'll actually give my tip-of-the-hat to Zoho. We use them at the small business where I work. I honestly think they have the best email services on the market today, and their webmail client is much better than Google's. Especially if you are using it alongside their other services. Their administration interface is also pretty good, making it easy to route email where you want it to go and even backup and export users' emails.
It depends on your email provider. It wasn’t difficult to set to with protonmail. I’d just Google “<email provider> custom domain”
Zoho has a free-forever email service with up to 5GB/User.
Works perfectly for me since I delete all of my emails anyway, though 5GB isn't terrible disregarding that.
You guys just made me buy a TLD. I'm from Brazil so Google Domains is cheaper and easier. Just bought https://crdpa.net , but it is not working yet (it needs 48 hrs)
The original address is https://crdpa.github.io/
Edit: it's working now!
great looking site! FYI, "TLD" stands for Top-Level Domain, i.e., .com, .net, .org, etc. I don't know what the whole "crdpa.net" is, maybe just "domain name?" I'm not sure.
But like I said, love the site's style! That ASCII art is really rad :)
Thanks!
Don't know the technical terms.
I have my website hosted on github pages and bought the address to redirect crdpa.net to crdpa.github.io
Isn't this what TLD means?
From what I understand (and also wikipedia), TLD is the last part of a fully-qualified domain, i.e., 'com', 'org', 'net', etc.
I think what you've done is probably set up a CNAME record or something similar (or it was set up for you) to kind of redirect
crdpa.github.iotocrdpa.neton the DNS level. It's also possible that Github set up a 301 redirect; I'm not sure what Github does.Got it.
I bought from Google Domains the adress (crdpa.net) today and did the redirecting myself in the config there to crdpa.github.io. Had to input 4 type A whatever with ip addresses and a CNAME config.
And from within the github page config i just put crdpa.net in the "Custom domain" config. This creates a CNAME file with "crdpa.net" inside on the repository.
Nice! DNS settings are crazy!
Hey! Your site looks really well, I've been using it (among others) as inspiration for what I'd put on a personal site. I'm mocking up one for myself.
I was wondering how you did the blog posts? Do you have a generator or are you writing them into the html?
Thanks!
I write the posts with markdown and use pandoc to convert the markdown file to html. It can use a css file as an argument so it keeps the style consistent. Here is the full command i use on my script:
I've been looking for a way to do exactly what you're doing, thank you very much!! Haven't put much effort into researching pandocs' arguments, and you made it so that I don't have to :)
Thank you! I'll have to take a look at that.
Based on the source code, it looks like they're converting github flavored markdown to HTML using pandoc.
Exactly, but it's just simple markdown. Nothing github related.
I made this script to do things automagically.
I personally prefer the more traditional TLDs so the links instantly mentally parse as URLs. My homepage is https://tokeniser.uk - I chose .uk because it was cheap, I didn't mind the association with my country, and because it has WHOIS privacy.
Personally, I think the safest TLDs for everyday use and business are:
.com
country-specific (e.g. .ca, .uk, .us)
.net
You can make some cool looking names with specific use cases, like for email with .email
I know .xyz and .me are gaining popularity as well.
For .info: I think i would shy away from this TLD. While it is perfectly valid, so many scammers use it, that i would be willing to bet that it automatically/systematically gets either blocked (emails), or throttled (via SEO)...i have no evidence to support my claim, just conjecture. Which is too bad, because the original concept for this TLD i thought was great!
For .xyz: It is cute, and I've seen more and more usage lately (maybe due to Alphabet's usage of it?), but not my cup of tea.
For .fyi: I like this one, as much as like the original concept for .info...but wonder if it makes better sense for a wiki or general info (like an FAQ-centric) site, instead of a personal site/blog? Hey, just my opinion of course.
For .computer: Cute, but seems long to type out, no? Maybe I'm lazy, but I grew up in a time where there really was only .com, .net, and .org...so take my comment with a grain of salt...Though, as someone else here pointed out, might be best suited if your blog is centered around computing, tech, and such. (I wish they instead used the shorter ".comp", but maybe i'm showing my usenet age. ;-)
For .me: I know this one is a country code, but i do like it. It is short to type, easy to read aloud, generally accepted for personal sites/blogs (and not as much for the country code). You might also have better luck getting a shorter domain name on .me, than, say, .com/.net/.org.
I'll add that for commercial/business-related efforts, stick with .com...maybe, maybe try .net or .org. As someone else pointed out, laypeople, the elderly, etc. are all comfortable with the 3 ol' tried-and-true TLDs.
For many years, I've been using .CC for my personal/family email address. I think the only thing that has avoided me from being blocked is the fact that i'm using google G suite...otherwise, i wonder if i would have had less luck getting my messages through. Anyway, my best friend years ago got me started on using .CC, because he was a computer consultant, so he marketed his consultancy and the .CC as all aligned. i thought it was a cute thing, and have used them a couple times for business and personal stuff. Lately for business, I've shied away from .CC, and stuck with .COM - even of the domain name ends up being longer.
Lately, as in about 2 years or so, I've started really getting into using the .RED TLD - for personal sites and technical project sites (like prototype apps, network experiments, etc.). It is now my favorite (3-letter/short) TLD! I am not a communist nor am i Russian; that's usually the first thing my American friends ask me (disclaimer: I am American but with many friends around the world). Also, I am not particularly a fan of (nor dislike) the color red (which i think was the original purpose of the TLD when it was created). I like to use .RED, because in my mind it represents "the new" .NET... AND, BECAUSE the Spanish word for "net" (or "mesh" or "web") is literally: red! To me, using a spanish-language TLD (even though it is not intended to be spanish-language) sounded cute. Plus, it is short (like.net), and not so popular, so i can get plenty of domain names; at least for now. Since it is not a ccTLD (not a country code), i don';t think it gets any localization "penalization" from the search engines; time will tell of course. So far I've not used it via email extensively; a little bit, yes, but not as my main email address...so can't speak for whether it will get blocked or throttled like other TLDs. Prices for them - so far- have been really low/reasonably priced. So far, the .RED TLD has been working great for me!
As far as registrars, I've tried many, many over the years (actually the very first domain name i got was back in 1997!). For the last 8 or so years, I've had luck with NameCheap. Their support seems fine, and their pricing is fair. Honestly though, i do not need much hand-holding, so not sure how extensive their support is. But I've not had any issue with Namecheap. Also, while I've not used gandi.net, I have heard many great things about them - both in behavior and pricing.
.com,.net, are all fine.infoseems spammy. Also look at this list and avoid these: https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/.space and .dev are my gotos at this point.
I suggest either Namecheap or Gandi but Google domains is fine too.
.page
.site
.tech
.codes
Lots of great options.
I register almost everything with https://porkbun.com. https://tld-list.com is made by a dude on HN and is a great way to figure out who has the best pricing. Not all registrars are the same, but typically porkbun has the best price (or close to it.)
For the TLD itself, you're right re: xyz. Personally, I like fun tlds like .party (I've got three of them) -- but some sites won't take the newer tlds for emails (especially .cricket.)
If you're mostly doing coding things, gpxl.io has a nice ring to it.
Here are the past topics regarding registrars:
https://tildes.net/~comp/li8/good_domain_registrars
https://tildes.net/~comp/2tx/which_domain_registrar_has_the_best_pricing_services
I got a <lastname>.co and I considering in getting something "better", on one hand I can have <firstname>@<lastname>.co as an email, but on the other hand the domain is too similar to .com, sometimes I even mistype it.
I’m quite partial to
.nameas that is what is was intended to be used for – and it’s as personal as it gets. :)Personal rant of an old fart who got a 3rd level .name address and now can’t get a 2nd level one
What I’m quite a bit salty about though is that originally you could only register a 3rd level domain with your name and surname, and you got an e-mail alias as part of the package – so e.g. my https://matija.name.suklje gives me also matija[ät]suklje[døt]name as an DNS-level alias for my e-mail. Sweet stuff!Where the salt comes in is that later they opened the registration to a 2nd level as well. So I tried to get
suklje.name, so I could get an e-mail alias for my whole family. But because someone already has a 3rd level domain registered, I can’t. Oh, and that someone is me, of all people! So, I’m stuck with a 3rd levelmatija.suklje.namealthough I managed to getšuklje.name(proper spelling of my surname) no problemo…