And who could blame them?  .co is definitely a good suffix for a company to use and is likely to become part of the mainstream, like .co.uk and .com.  This is not guaranteed however, .biz domains have been around for a while, but haven’t caught on as much as they could have – people still prefer to use .co.uk as this is the more recognisable suffix and the same may be true of .co domains.  The one significant advantage .co has is that it is a global suffix, so if you are operating across borders there is no need to necessarily have lots of domains to match with the markets you operate in.

 

So what is the best domain suffix to use?

 

As with almost everything, the answer to this depends on the situation; the first port of call is to check whether your company name has already been registered and, if so, which suffixes are already taken and how much impact these existing registrations will have on your business.  If most options are already taken you should think carefully about registering the left-overs.  Take Twitter as an example, they set up their site and registered twitter.com, as it was available and probably left it at that (in fact twitter.co.uk had been registered before the idea of Twitter had even been conceived).  Due to the success of Twitter the .co.uk site now receives around 3,000 hits a day, for no other reason that they have a similar domain name.  If there are already people using a similar domain to the one you want to register and you go ahead and register, build and market the site there is a risk that your efforts will drive traffic to the alternate site as well as your own.  If you are in direct competition with the other site, this could prove disastrous.  If you were setting up a candle shop and found candles.com and candles.co.uk had both been taken but candles.biz was available, would you take it?  Probably best not to as people may remember the candles aspect but opt for the more common .co.uk or .com suffix – again you are driving trade to your competitors.

 

Here at Firestar Design, we use www.firestardesign.co.uk; we’re fully aware of www.firestardesign.com and that it belongs to a company operating in the US in a similar market to us.  To be fair, they got there first and have probably been around longer than us, but are unlikely to be a major threat to our business as they operate in a market several thousand miles away.  At the same time, there is little risk of us being accused of cyber-squatting (the rather annoying act of registering a domain just because you’ll get some extra traffic on your site through confusion with a similar domain) and benefiting from their domain traffic so everyone is happy.

 

So, back to the original question: what is the best domain suffix to use? The simple answer is all of them, within reason.  Many providers now offer packages to register all available suffixes to an available domain, for the sole reason of preventing future cyber-squatters from profiting from your future success.  These can be pretty cheap and act as an insurance policy against issues in the future (for as long as the current domain structure is in existence at least.)  As new domain suffixes become available, then you must also decide whether to register them to maintain your monopoly on the domain; again, this depends on a number of factors, including the number of visitors you have and the attractiveness of your domain name.  If you had all the available suffixes on www.gold then you would be far more keen to maintain your monopoly than if you had www.johnsmithautorepairs. and all the related suffixes.

 

In short the registration of a domain name is a pretty simple and low-cost activity; the registration of the right domain name can be more complex and requires a lot more thought – if you are set on a particular domain and it is already registered, it can also be a lot more costly so it is worth getting in quick, before your company hits the headlines and some bright spark goes off and registers it for you, ready to sell to you later at a profit!

 

One final point… did we register www.firestardesign.co when we had the chance?  It’s a bit of a rip-off at several times the price of other suffixes but we’d still rather we had it than anyone else.

 

For advice on domain registration or any other issues associated with building or developing your online capabilities, get in touch with us using the contact form on this site or by giving us a call.  We can register most domain names for a mere £10.00 (apart from .co, which are a little more expensive!)