Ask HN: Which domain extension would you choose for your personal site?

[kerneldeveloper]

Many people have their personal website which may be a blog or a project homepage and there are also several awesome domain extensions for us to choose from, such as .me, .io, .info and .tech.

Which one would you choose for your site? Why do you prefer it?

[RickS]

Depends strongly on the purpose of the page.

If it's meant to be customer facing, and your customers can't write a for loop, .com (or your country's equivalent) is really the only legitimate choice. SMBs trying to sell to mom and pop types with .io domains are needlessly alienating their customers.

If it's genuinely just for kicks, my favorites are the ones that spell out yourna.me or fabulo.us or the like.

People joke that I have a porn star's name, so I own rick.xxx, but I also own ricksteeledesign.com as a backup because that kind of thing isn't always appropriate.

[shanecleveland]

I believe the biggest consideration is how readable, understandable and pronounceable the domain and extension will be. It's not something you want to be clever about, particularly if you will host your email there.

I've purchased and maintain .coms for all of my kids and nieces and nephews. I've gotten sites up with birth announcements for most of them within minutes of being born (didn't know sex/name until birth for all of them). I have had to purchase one .net domain, as the .com was unavailable.

It still seems like the .com is the best way to go, if available. I think .net is good. Best vanity extension for a name is .me, I believe, if preferable options are not available.

[sharmi]

I would always go with a dot com site. I owned a MYNAME.me site hoping to shift to it one day. Never got around to it. When a year passed, the domain expired without warning. In case of a dot com domain, there is period of suspension for a month before the domain expires and goes back to the pool. During that period, you cannot use the domain but you still can renew the domain and no one else can register it.

The learning is that, with dot com domains, the rules of domain registration and expiry are more well established. The other tlds can and do change these procedures. So do not go in expecting the same stuff that worked with dot com (esp. The edge cases) to work with other tlds.

[kerneldeveloper]

Which TLD provider do you buy your domain from? I have bought two .me domains from namecheap and there will be many notifications before expiration.

[_f1g6]

.co.uk -> personal blog and homelab stuff

.com -> [e-mail] email (People get impressed by this? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

.com or .tech -> For project stuff, I use .tech if .com is taken; .io also works :)

[davchana]

Few people with gmail address still email me at [e-mail] :(

[zem]

i like the good old .net. for better or worse, the new ones don't have quite the same cachet as the traditional .com, .org and .net, and of the three .net seems the most fitting for a personal site.

[zhte415]

[e-mail]

In early 2000s was annoyed with having to switch between mail providers depending on fees introduced, so decided to go with something that was agnostic and as a domain name was rented at least on my terms.

1. Common TLD. Most annoying thing today is others want it. Not a very common first or last name in themselves, but in combination quite a common match.

2. Unusual TLDs. No idea, however having a name.co could well be mis-typed/remembered as a .com depending on your audience. Don't know. Don't assume other people are as savvy as you.

3. Friends with far more common names have done creative but also somewhat agnostic stuff, like '1'insertfirstnamehere.com. This is less likely to be mistyped, as the name is obvious as is the extension.

Just throwing some ideas outside of pure TLD.

[grkvlt]

> Not a very common first or last name in themselves, but in combination quite a common match

I'm sort of confused. You state that your first name and last name are not common. That is, there is a low probability some random person has the same first name as you, and also a low probability some random person has the same last name as you. We can write that as follows:

    P(N_f = F, N_l = *) < X
    P(N_f = *, N_l = L) < X

Where X is a low probability, and F and L are your first and last names while N_f and N_l are the first and last names of some random person. So, how can the following hold:

    P(N_f = F, N_l = L) > X

That is, the probability some random person has both your first name and your last name is higher, or in your words the occurrence is 'quite common.'

It should be obvious this is not possible.

[zhte415]

Not at all. You're assuming first names and last names are independent.

For example, meet a 'Jones'. There's a good probability that his first names is 'Thomas'.

Meet a 'Thomas'. There's a low probability his last name is 'Jones'.

That's because 'Jones' is predominantly Welsh in origin, and 'Thomas' is a pretty liked given name in Wales. This of course would be more true in Wales than people of Welsh ancestory living far from Wales. And perhaps despite and because of the great singer Tom Jones, this combination may have fallen over the past few decades.

However, my family name is pretty location-specific in the UK, and even the diaspora of the name that went to places like North America tended to keep up traditional, albeit 2-3 centuries later.

Another example of non-independence would be a name like 'Ahmed' as given name and 'Zhang' as family name. 'Zhang' is an extremely common family name on a global scale, as is 'Ahmed' as a given name. However the possibility of 'Ahmed' and 'Zhang' overlapping as a combination is slim. Perhaps it could happen in Singapore or Malaysia, but then even 'Zhang' is probably converted to a Hokkian/Hakka/Cantonese equivalent spelling, which is not 'Zhang'. Given the scale of these names, I'm sure there 'Ahmed Zhang's knocking around, but probably not that many.

The great thing about statistics is it is about discovery, not assumptions.

And assuming everything is nice easy math, independent, or stochastic, is one of the greatest mistakes we can all make when looking at numbers.

[grkvlt]

So, you're actually saying something like P(N_l = L | N_f = F) or P(N_f = F | N_l = L) is (for those sub-populations) high, while P(N_l = L, N_f = F) is still globally not common. That makes more sense, but is a different statement - the combined names are common within a local population but still uncommon globally.

[GFischer]

I have the exact same combination ([e-mail]) .

The one problem I've found it's that it's seriously long to type and my surname is very prone to typos from people used to the American spelling instead of German.

Nobody has tried to buy it from me yet.

I wanted lastname with my local TLD but my father beat me to it :P and my uncle shares my initial and has initial+lastname registered.

[davchana]

Can you ask your father to give you subdomain first.lastname.tld? and email [e-mail]?

[GFischer]

Good idea, but it would be very confusing. Also my father has the same name as I do, and his e-mail is [e-mail] !!!.

Good thing I'm not a lawyer too, or it would be too confusing.

[shanecleveland]

I have my firstnamelastname.com, and I like to use [e-mail] ;)

[zhte415]

Nice. I see that on your profile page too. It is pretty easy.

I also like to use wildcards. [e-mail] goes to my single mailbox, but with headers intact.

Can really where the spam and affiliate stuff comes from, especially over the years, not just a few weeks.

[ge96]

I want a .io name but damn they're expensive... also can't pick a domain name... can't believe something seemingly random like pad91 exists... 91server... exists all redirect pages but man...

tried the name domains but I have a stupid long four-part name...

[kerneldeveloper]

I have decided to buy a MYNAME.io domain. I will regret not buying it if it is taken by others.

[ge96]

More power to you man 30 bucks or something... is that per year too when you renew it? I'm cheap, $4-5/mo VPS runs my sites at this time (also means hardly any traffic/no ROI but whatever). So a $30/yr domain though it is a one time expense per year.

Kind of interested with those odd domains like .us was $3.00 before, but I think that's a promotional first time buyer thing.

Maybe the VPS argument doesn't make sense, almost $60/yr I think it was $40 something that bulk-buy discount sort of thing.

[kerneldeveloper]

It's worth it! Pick a good domain name and set up a blog and then, write some awesome blogs! Hey, man, you won't regret it.

[stevekemp]

At the time I registered my domain the suffix was less important and interesting than the name itself. My name is 'Steve' so I wanted to have 'steve.xxx'. Sadly I missed out on the .com/.net/.org, but I did register steve.org.uk

Last year I moved to Finland, and on a whim I saw that steve.fi was due to expire in a couple of months. I figured since I was in Finland now I could claim that - and was lucky enough to grab it.

In conclusion: For a company/service the suffix matters, but for a personal site? I figured that people would get their via google, probably, but if not that it should reflect my name - which is a little selfish, but seemed more memorable.

[xpinguin]

.onion:

- free, no periodic fees for the registry entry

- natural content quality metric, if people do bother to download&run TBB or at least use some public www->onion gateway, not to mention writing down/remembering the address

- easy to self-host in a variety of conditions

[dfederschmidt]

I've chosen .xyz for my personal homepage because it was cheap, new and looks nice in my opinion. As good .com domains start to become rare I think .xyz has potential to become one of the next well-known general purpose domains.

[SyneRyder]

Be careful of .xyz. Recent $1 sales on .xyz have caused it to be bought by a lot of email spammers. If you also want to use it for email (not just as a website), you'll run into delivery issues.

[NameNickHN]

I have a domain where the extension is the last two letters of my last name, like mill.er. It also gives me a pretty cool mail address, e.g. [e-mail].

[ge96]

You rent a mailing service right? If you did setup your own mail server I'm curious... I can't shell out the $5/mo when my VPS that runs several sites cost that much... but it is nice... having a non-gmail email.

[GFischer]

I'm not the OP, but I wanted to mention that using Zoho Mail for personal use with your own domain is free, and they're pretty good overall.

[ge96]

Thanks for the tip I wonder what the catch is? (Your data is ours!!! Muhahaha) haha...

[jagermo]

I use .de for my personal site, but I had it for ages now. If I had something international, I'd take the one where a cool name is still available.

[otras]

I have a relatively common name, which meant that any combination similar to firstlast.com or first-last.com was either taken or beyond my personal site budget. I chose the FirstnameLastna.me route. My last name ends in "is", so I ended up getting an Icelandic domain (Þakka þér ISNIC!). It makes it more interesting to me and always makes for a good story after sharing my portfolio.

[Samathy]

I own a .co.uk for my personal site. I did have a .uk for a while, but it serves no purpose when I already have .co.uk.

I also owned FNAME.space, FNAME.tech and FNAME.xyz but never got around to switching my site to one. In hindsight, FNAME.space would be super chill.

But honestly, for a personal site, it really doesn't matter that much unless you already have a personal 'brand' to maintain.

[gtirloni]

I think the general advice is too avoid extensions with shady business practices (so you don't end losing your domain). Other than that, I think we are over extensions having any meaning (.com business, .net providers, .org nonprofits, etc).

I'd choose something that is easy to say over the phone for my target audience (if you're going to use it for email too)

[0x54MUR41]

I'm using domainname.web.{my country TLD} because it's cheap (than .co and .net) and very popular for personal blog/site in my country (Indonesia). By the way, my country TLD is .id. The other reason why I chose it because I want to give a support. I mean let the world know that's my country TLD.

[drakonka]

I went with .io because it is short and sort of quirkily relevant to my area, and had my first name still available.

[keviv]

I own FirstnameLastname.com as well as Firstname-Lastname.com. I used to have a FirstnameLastname.info as well.

I've seen a lot of people using .me for their personal site as well. Not many use .io because it's costlier compared to other extensions.

[PatentTroll]

[e-mail]

I love it but it's hard incredibly hard to explain to customer sercice reps or family members that "no, not .com or anything, just my last name with a period before the last two letters."

[kerneldeveloper]

.me is suitable for personal site and it is indeed a problem for a company. However, a takeaway website in China owns the domain "ele.me" which is easier for Chinese to pronounce it with Chinese phonetic alphabet.

[PatentTroll]

Oh, sorry, I meant that as an example. It's not '.me' - the last two letters are just the last two letters of my last name which happen to correspond to a country code TLD, something like '[e-mail]'

[jetti]

My blog, which was taken down a year ago, is a .com. I have a i.ng sitting around (African TLD) that I may use for a blog of some sort as it is cod.i.ng. I wanted codi.ng but it was taken.

[davchana]

.ng is sooo expensive!! (xx,xxx$?)

[jetti]

who were you looking at as a registrar? I used Web4Africa and it wasn't bad for .i.ng but I wasn't able to find any .ng that I wanted so I guess I didn't get a good idea of the price.

[smichel17]

I've got {FInitial}{LName}.me.

Haven't really used it for much but am soon planning to transfer from my university email to {FInitial}@ for professional email and me@ for personal email.

[fiiv]

.io is the one I like to use.

Many domains are still available and the cost is decently low (in comparison to some of the other especially new TLDs), only something like €30/year.

[UtkarshGpta]

I use {my-most-commonly-used-username}.com for my personal website.

Most commonly used username for GitHub, BitBucket, stackoverflow, or any other networks/websites.

[TrickyRick]

I was too cheap for a .io so I bought a .me instead

[crispytx]

I like .xyz because it's easy to get the name that you want. Dot io domains are pretty cool too but they're expensive.

[apexalpha]

I just registered my first and last name on both .com and .nl.

Not using them... But don't want others to have them.

[deft]

I'm using $commonusername.xyz because it was cheap. And kinda cool.

[cluoma]

I use .com personally. Would have preferred a .ca but it was taken.

[id122015]

the best I saw other people use is .name

Wikipedia says its for personal use.

[bbcbasic]

.beer