The Domain Name Extension Guide Which Should You Use?

What domain extension is best for me? We cannot give you a straight answer, and that is something you ultimately will have to decide after reading this page. This page has some important information on the types of domains you can choose from, and knowing these types before buying a domain is very important to the future of your website.

What is the overall best domain extension. Well, they are not there just to make your domain name look cool. The ultimate choice will depend on what the website will be about. For instance we highly suggest .com. for personal blog's, forums, and your typical business sites. Why do I suggest this? The answer is simple being .com is known all over the world, and people searching for a product or information would likely first think of doing searches for a .com site before they tried .gov. The simple answer is that .com is the most popular.

Yes, I did say people will search using domain extensions, and this is a very common practice today. If someone was looking to buy sticky speakers, they may just head to their browser address bar and type in stickyspeakers.com. Of course this is a fictional website, but the reality is that people do sometimes search this way. When someone thinks of website name they automatically think of .com.

One of the biggest mistakes is to have a long complicated domain name. Example of a not so great domain name would be very_cheap_womens_clothing.com or nice_cheap_living_room_furniture.com. The better choice for each of those domains would be cheapclothes.com or cheapfurniture.com. The shorter the domain name the more valuable it is. Name the domain so that people can remember it. People remember michelespaintshop.com and what is nice about the domain name is that my main keywords and subject are in the domain name. When I meet someone and tell them they can find me on the internet by just looking me up on Google under Michele's Paint Shop. It is easy to remember, and with a quick search for Michele's Paint they should find me. How simple is that?

Domain ownership details. When you buy a domain name for a personal site, blog, or forum it is highly recommended that you register your domain so that your personal information is set to private. This means that when someone looks up your domain name they will not see your full name, address, phone number and more. If you are a legal business entity and you will not be using your home address then you may not want to register privately. Typically this feature runs between $0.00 and $10.00 a yr. In my opinion the most crucial time to use private registration is when you're serving your very own website from home.

To sum things up we now know we must take time when it comes to our domain names and extensions. See the list of domain choices below, and then see my final log about the importance of domain name choices.

Main Domain Extension Types Suffix Extension Descriptions

• .com (.commercial) is a generic top-level domain. It was one of the original top-level domains, and has grown to be the largest in use.




• .org (.organization) is a generic top-level domain, and is mostly associated with non-profit organizations. It is also used in the charitable field, and used by the open-source movement. Government sites and Political parties in the US have domain names ending in .org




• .net (.network) is a generic top-level domain and is one of the original top-level domains. Initially intended to be used only for network providers (such as Internet service providers). It is still popular with network operators, it is often treated as a second .com. It is currently the third most popular top-level domain.




• .edu (.education) is the generic top-level domain for educational institutions, primarily those in the United States. One of the first top-level domains, .edu was originally intended for educational institutions anywhere in the world. Only post-secondary institutions that are accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies are eligible to apply for a .edu domain.




• .info (.information) is a generic top-level domain intended for informative website's, although its use is not restricted. It is an unrestricted domain, meaning that anyone can obtain a second-level domain under .info. The .info was one of many extension(s) that was meant to take the pressure off the overcrowded .com domain.




• .gov (.government) a generic top-level domain used by government entities in the United States. The .gov domain is administered by the General Services Administration (GSA), an independent agency of the federal government. The U.S. is the only country that has a government-specific top-level domain in addition to its top level domain. This is due to the origins of the Internet as a US Federal Government-sponsored research network. Other countries typically use a second-level domain for this purpose, e.g., .gov.uk for the United Kingdom. Since the United States controls the .gov Top Level Domain, it would be impossible for another country to create a domain ending in .gov.




• .biz (business) the name is a phonetic spelling of the first syllable of "business." A generic top-level domain to be used by businesses. It was created due to the demand for good domain names available in the .com top-level domain, and to provide an alternative to businesses whose preferred .com domain name which had already been registered by another. The qualifications to register a .biz domain name it must be for "bona fide business or commercial use".




• .mobi (also known informally as dotMobi) is a top-level domain dedicated to delivering the Internet to mobile devices via the Mobile Web. NOTE: .mobi has already made headlines with several 6-figure domain sales. I suggest lock in your domain name in .mobi .MOBI Domains from GoDaddy.com to protect your domain from cyber squatters, or at least as a possible positive investment. The cost is very low. .mobi is financially backed and sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica Móviles, Telecom Italia Mobile, Orascom Telecom, GSM Association , Hutchison Whampoa, Syniverse Technologies, and VISA. It worth looking into. You really should consider having a .mobi domain to direct your cell phone visitors when they visit your normal website.

Importance Of Domain Names Multiple Related Meanings

Some will disagree with me that a domain name is important, but from my experience domain names are important and you should take great care when picking out a domain name. This is a outline of just how important a domain name is to you and your business. (source: wikipedia)

The term domain name has multiple related meanings:

• A name that identifies a computer or computers on the Internet. These names appear as a component of a Web site's URL, e.g. en.wikipedia.org. This type of domain name is also called a hostname.




• The product that domain name registrars provide to their customers. These names are often called registered domain names.




• Names used for other purposes in the Domain Name System (DNS), for example the special name which follows the @ sign in an email address, or the Top-level domain names like .com, or the names used by the Session Initiation Protocol (VoIP), or DomainKeys.




• They are sometimes colloquially (and incorrectly) referred to by marketers as "web addresses".