IMO .me is one of the safer ccTLDs. It's from a fairly stable country that hasn't been keen to hike up the prices or impose restrictions on who can have their domains so far; it's not often associated with spam; and it's even used by large companies like Facebook (fb.me).
When it comes to pricing, though, you never know what will happen down the road. I honestly don't know who I'd like to trust more: Verisign or the government of Montenegro?
> When it comes to pricing, though, you never know what will happen down the road. I honestly don't know who I'd like to trust more: Verisign or the government of Montenegro?
Since .me is more targetet at / suitable for individuals rather than a hipster startup domain like .io, the prices will hopefully remain lower. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself.
Some country tlds are risky because they don't necessarily check residency requirements when you purchase, but might later if your domain catches their attention. Not all have residency requirements, but some do.
There's also some TLDs that are well known for web spam, phishing, or email spam, sometimes because of free or cheap subdomains. Those might have issues getting indexed in Google, or issues with SMTP delivery. Google once deindexed the entirety of *.co.cc, for example.
A couple, but they're all "human" reasons and not really technical. The TLDs records will be served off the gTLD nameservers like everything else, you can change your own nameservers from there, and DNS is slow as hell anyway (by modern standards) so it's already not like it's tightly optimized usually, and performance as perceived by the end user is greatly predicated on how warm their cache is. So any performance difference between nameservers probably barely matters unless you're like Amazon or something.
Anyway, non-objective reasons I can think of:
Lots of people don't know anything but com exists.
Com is definitely still dominant, so someone sitting on yourthing.com when yourthing.biz.no is your real site will probably be getting some chunk of your traffic. Imagine if Amazon.co.uk was the real Amazon and Amazon.com was like, a news website dedicated to posting all the bad stuff Amazon does. Tbh that'd be nice for society but you can probably understand it would be undesirable for a company.
.io is one of the only ones that's managed to kinda read com-like status, and it's only for a niche (though a lucrative niche!) audience.
> Imagine if Amazon.co.uk was the real Amazon and Amazon.com was like
This is actually an interesting example, because Amazon.com is a US/Canada specific site, while Amazon.co.uk is the UK/Ireland site (though I'd imagine they'll eventually either set up an Amazon.ie or change the redirect to Amazon.de with the tax/import brexit implications of that). So while all domains are Amazon owned, I wouldn't say Amazon has .com primacy over regional domains.
Ditto for google search, though the rest of their products are on google.com for me (I think gmail used to be googlemail.co.uk in the UK and googlemail.de in Germany because of local companies who had the gmail name first, until Google bought out the names from the local owners).
All the web 2.0 or newer companies are .com rather than regionalised though.
I remember reading a blog post that I can't find that one company saw a massive uptick on email deliverability when they stop using .xyz and moved to a more standard one.
It makes some sense, .xyz are so cheap that I've bought mines for $1 so just buying a domain every day isn't outside the realms of possbility for spammers. Personally, I just use my .xyz domains for internal stuff where I still want things connected to the internet and available.
While there are some performance differences [1] between TLDs, I don't personally think it should factor very heavily when choosing one.
As for reliability, there have been a few ".io" outages and I remember ".club" going down a few years ago but DNS makes complete TLD outages pretty rare.
I'd say the biggest reason to avoid certain TLDs is the human factor. Humans are used to typing ".com" or ".org" or ".net". I don't have any data to back that up though, so it probably isn't a satisfying answer!
ccTLDs are perhaps marginally less reliable given who has overriding control over them (.ly is Libya, for example), but beyond that it's probably pretty low on your list of things to care about.
This is not true if you want email to come from you main domain and you choose a remotely exotic TLD. I learned this the hard way. Don't be like me, choose a boring TLD, worry about less stupid things - there are so so many already.
New gTLDs - The registry can pretty much arbitrarily set prices in the future
ccTLDs - Politics might make you have to change domain (e.g. UK owners of .eu)
Pick your poison, I tend to stick with the original TLDs and my own country's ccTLD