[bjt]

It's not about the .online TLD being "weird". The problem is that it was free. That's going to attract a swarm of fraudsters, spammers, etc, and then turn into a strong "this is probably fraud" signal in all kinds of fraud scoring systems.

There are lots of domains out there other than .com that are just fine.

[fckgw]

.online, .top, .xyz. info and .shop are some of the top TLDs that scammers use, precisely because of their rock bottom registrar fees that make them attractive for sites that have a shelf life of a few hours or a few days before being blocked. As a result, many places have a blanket "suspicious" flag for fresh domains under these TLDs.

If you plan on building a legit site, do not use any of these cheap TLDs.

[al_borland]

Paying through the nose for a .com that is remotely memorable and easy to spell is not a great path forward for a hobbyist or someone who simply wants their own domain for email.

I know someone with a .org domain, and even they have a ton of issues with false flags on their emails due to not coming from a big email provider. They’ve been blacklisted a couple times and regularly get flagged as spam. I’m surprised he hasn’t given up after dealing with this stuff for 25 years.

These new TLDs, I thought, were supposed to open up more options for regular people to get a domain that is semi-decent. Instead they’re essentially useless. Some of the prices are also still insane, due to assumed “premium” status or domain squatters.

There has to be a better way to police this stuff.

[def13]

If you live in the west/developed world, the solution for hobbyists/small projects/individuals is generally to use the a local ccTLD. I'm from Australia, I use a `.au`. Between `.au` (which they opened up recently) and `id.au` its not hard to find a memorable/useful url for about $20/year, as people/companies have been mostly keeping to the `.{org,com,net}.au` names.

I see a lot of .fr, .de, .jp (and many other European ccTLDs) used by people from those places for their hobbyists/small projects/individual purposes. The regulators and operators of these domains tend to be pretty decently reputable. They often require proof of either local residence/citizenship or local business, which keeps domains more available, at the cost of requiring you to hand over some identifying information.

Now for whatever reason, I don't really see the `.us` one in use at all, so that is potentially a big exception to the initial premise for people from the US. I presume that its due to combination of it being operated by GoDaddy and the fact the `.com` and `.org` are sort of defacto US ccTLDs..

[mixmastamyk]

Try finding a pithy domain these for under 10,000 these days. I tried a week ago and had to settle for something a lot longer than I wanted and even then it was something from outside the common three letter TLDs.

[garganzol]

Probably this is what's happened here. Either the OP's domain was previously used for shady activities, or the almost-free stigma puts the whole .TLD in the grey list of high-risk assets. Probably is also explains the nuclear behavior of the registrar (suspension).

Free is good, but sometimes it's not.