Ask HN: What TLD do you use for your personal site and email?

3 points by buttsex 11 years ago | 10 comments

I'm in the process of moving away from my gmail account and would like a personal domain for my email and website. I already own firstnamelastname.com, the problem is that my first and last name together are really long and I'd like something shorter, for email especially (i.e. me@lastname.com). I'm thinking of getting lastname.co since lastname.com is taken and the guy won't give it up (funny since lastname.com was registered in Colombia and I think he's Colombian). My last name is short so it looks nice. I could come up with some hacky domain names but I like the simplicity of lastname.co

In this day and age, is there any downside to owning a .co TLD (besides typos). I plan to use me@lastname.co for email and I'd like to make some aliases for different services (dropbox@lastname.co, contests@lastname.co). I would host a small blog at the domain name, I don't really promote myself too much, and if you Google my name it would come up at the top any way.

What do you guys use?

bramgg 11 years ago |

I use the .gg TLD. My personal site is bram.gg and my email is hello@bram.gg

.gg is my favorite TLD, and the most underrated. It's expensive enough that the domain you want probably isn't taken, but cheap enough that it's worth the price if it's something you care about. "gg" is also a common phrase in gaming subculture, meaning "good game".

Quick plug, if you're looking for a quick and fun domain for your personal email, check out my open source project Hipster Domain Finder[0]. You can use it to find some pretty awesome short domain hacks and it even allows you to sort by TLD.

[0] http://www.hipsterdomainfinder.com

chrisBob 11 years ago |

My dad has setup email forwarding for the whole family as firstname@lastname.org. The .org is easy to explain and I think it suits a personal email well.

gregcohn 11 years ago |

Our company name is a .co. It is generally fine but does lead to some email going astray as people, either out of habit, assumption, or auto-correct, occasionally address it to the .com variant.

jordsmi 11 years ago |

Currently have a .me for my personal email but am switching to a .com soon.

For which TLD to choose, it really depends on the use case. For just personal email, or if your site is catered to more tech people you can really use anything. If it is being used more for the public I'd be careful because many people don't know things past .com or .net

I often get .co for sites and it usually works fine, but sometimes I've seen non tech savvy people mistake it as a typo and send emails to the .com version

emsy 11 years ago |

I use an .email TLD. Quite long and most people don't know it yet but for dedicated email usage it fits quite well.

jordsmi 11 years ago | |

Only problem I've seen with these newer TLD's is sometimes on shittier made sites they deny it as being a valid email. Heck, even my .me domain gets denied as being a valid email and that's been around for awhile now.

emsy 11 years ago | | |

I've never noticed it, because I use free email services for registrations. My .email address is for professional and personal use.

pzxc 11 years ago |

I use .US for email, because it's on of the cheapest TLDs possible. I have a couple really short .US domains but since .US is geotargeted by google, it doesn't work well for a website, but works great for email

hashtag 11 years ago |

These days I am moving away from anything that isn't a .com. I have a couple domains that I think are other TLD for legacy reasons but trying hard not to buy anything that isn't a .com generally

sogen 11 years ago |

.me seems to be somewhat popular.

what about .net?

nice username btw