Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name

http://blorn.com/post/29851770158/beware-cutesy-two-letter-tlds-for-your-domain-name

by stickfigure • 14 years ago

38 43 14 years ago

blorn.com

stickfigure3• 14 years ago

As of this moment, our site is still down. Any suggestions regarding how to deal with this situation?

Update: Over 8 hours of downtime later, dns is delegating properly again. Voost is back up.

voltagex_• 14 years ago

Google translate yielded:

Service and Support Technical and General Affairs Office hours: 08:00 to 18:00, Front-hour on-call, 24/7 as an option Tel: 08-555771 55 Fax: 08-555 771 99 Mail: support@bahnhof.se

Sales Questions regarding contracts and RFPs. Hours: 9:00 a.m. to 17:00 Tel: 08-555771 50 Fax: 08-555771 99 Mail: sales@bahnhof.se

cheald• 14 years ago

Buy voostapp.com, point it at your servers, and tweet about it (or use some other form of out-of-band communication) while you let people know you're working on it.

jhuckestein• 14 years ago

Call them

etiam• 14 years ago

It's a long shot, but you could try calling the CEO, Jon Karlung Phone: +46 (0)761 110160 (this is a cell phone, so there is a chance he's not away from it even though the time is closing in on 1 AM over here)

Alternatively, same reasoning with the CEO of Bahnhof Unipessoal Lda: Johnny Aspman Phone: +46 (0) 76 111 01 02

I hope you will get help sorting this out as soon as possible, but I would add that unless you signed up for 24/7 duty service, I don't think you are being quite fair to the provider; so far you are getting exactly what they declared you would: Phone support 08:00-18:00 CEST, weekdays.

Good luck!

lotyrin• 14 years ago

Yeah. Also, if your TLD belongs to somewhere with a less than stable government, who knows if they'll just stop caring about you.

And, a portion of your users will always try to go to whatever.com instead of whatev.er, the worst part is you have no idea how many, but the guy that's parked the domain probably does. As you grow your business, traffic to the .com domain will only increase, you'll eventually want to buy it but whoever owns it will know they've got your balls in a vice, and you'll have no idea if it's even worth it (except by their word).

It's fine for certain types of businesses (especially those consumed by machines or the people who love them). Sites with eyes for mass appeal should probably try to come up with a memorable-yet-unique .com.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 14 years ago

E.g.: bit.ly became bitly.com, although that seems like a branding decision (with the whole "social link discovery site" thing)

phillmv• 14 years ago

Also, Libya.

bigiain3• 14 years ago

Does anyone know what sort of money that cost them?

I suspect some domaineer was very happy that day…

(we blew $11k for the .com version of a .com.au domain we'd started to succeed with 6 or 7 years back. Ultimately futile, but not really related to that expense…)

TazeTSchnitzel5• 14 years ago

Depends which. My site's at .me, which, being well hyped and having over 100,000 domains, is probably not going to go down soon.

freshhawk4• 14 years ago

That is definitely different. I understand the catchy headline and the grouping together of newer tlds but it's unfair.

The headline should have read "do at least a modicum of research into a company you are about to tie your entire brand to before you do so".

This doesn't apply to a lot of "cutesy" two letter tlds and it does apply to a lot of things that aren't tlds (whatever fly-by-night/about to get aqui-hired SAAS startups you are considering using as core pieces of your business)

gdsf34dfsg• 14 years ago

How would one do this research?

It's very hard to understand how services operate until there is a failure?

skeletonjelly2• 14 years ago

"Too big to fail"

TazeTSchnitzel5• 14 years ago

And? Same would apply to .com.

Thrymr• 14 years ago

Sure. It's at least as stable as Montenegro, a country that has only been independent for 6 years, in the least stable corner of Europe.

mparlane• 14 years ago

Customer service private Phone: 08-555 771 00 Weekdays: 08:00 to 21:00 Weekends: 10:00 to 14:00 Mail: customer service (at) bahnhof.se

tomku3• 14 years ago

I'll add another reason: People will mistakenly go to <yourname>.com in droves, regardless of how easy it is to remember or how clever the domain/TLD split is. Having a cute short url is trendy, but it doesn't mean you can avoid the .com if you actually want people to find your site reliably.

I'll also add that visiting http://voo.st/ is giving a "Domain Available" page for me. Completely inexcusable that their error state is advertising for someone to buy your domain.

dasil003• 14 years ago

I think this problem is rapidly diminishing over time as people just google everything.

tomku3• 14 years ago

It's still better to have the .com anyways, because then you aren't potentially competing on SEO with someone else with the same brand name and a "better" domain to use it with. Like it or not, .com domains are the de facto namespace for consumer-facing products and having the .com for your brand up for sale or already taken is just asking for problems.

freehunter• 14 years ago

Why is it that halfway down the page, while I'm getting into the meat of the post, a banner pops down from the top blocking the text I'm reading? I like to keep my current line right at the top of the page, so I have to scroll back up. Then it disappears! Frustrating.

Lasher• 14 years ago

With ICANN opening up .[anything] to the highest bidders this kind of situation is only going to get worse. Stick with the global TLDs and the major (stable) country codes.

seanconaty• 14 years ago

No matter what happens .com will always be King.

skeletonjelly2• 14 years ago

There's going to be a point where it'll be impossible for new businesses to choose a domain name that isn't abstracted so far away from their business name as all the domains are taken. I'm curious as to the what the system will be like in 5 years. Surely .com can't be king forever?

thristian• 14 years ago

We already thought of this problem - we said "hey, there'll be different companies with the same name; we should introduce different namespaces so that, say, a company in Australia and a company in Austria don't clash.

Turns out, end-users want a flat namespace, so everybody has to buy names in that namespace. Until ICANN opens up the top-level domain space to arbitrary registrations (instead of the current 'you have to spend $150,000 and run a registrar' deal), that flat namespace is probably going to be .com.

FuzzyDunlop• 14 years ago

As a complete aside, is 'discuss this on Hacker News' a new offshoot social network link to pin to your tech blog?

If you're writing an HN-centric post, it surely stands to reason it should be an Ask-HN article, right?

stickfigure3• 14 years ago

"Ask HN" means no links, no images, no formatting. Good for a quick question, bad for exposition.

I think the "Discuss this on Hacker News" phenomenon reflects that while HN is a great community and discussion forum, it's a terrible publishing medium. Probably by design.

davesmylie• 14 years ago

I was reading this about an hour ago thinking that I was glad I had gone for the .com and that this sort of thing wouldn't effect me.

However, I just found out that my mail provider (25mail.st) is failing for the same reason. My app now has no incoming/outgoing email. This is isn't the end of the world, but a bit frustrating none-the-less.

I guess the lesson here is to beware of both cutesy two-letter TLD's for your domain name and cutesy two-letter TLD's the in the domain names of the mission critical services which you subscribe to.

pervycreeper• 14 years ago

Anybody willing to share which unusual TLDs are reasonably reliable?

briandear• 14 years ago

.me (Macedonia) is very solid. Not a single problem in 3 years.

TillE• 14 years ago

Everyone around here seems to like .is (Iceland), which is a bit pricey but has good policies. I grabbed a two-letter .is domain about a year ago.

lwat• 14 years ago

Better than .com addresses these days though...

cfront• 14 years ago

There is no quality control in the ICANN root. You grease some palms and you're in. .pw?

The situation will get much worse if the new gtld program is allowed to proceed.

Read up on the lawsuit that ICANN is in with Manwin, a porn company. The courts are getting closer to lifting the veil on ICANN, who has long claimed they cannot be sued as a commercial entity.

Considering they just banked over 350 million for giving people the right to be reviewed by ICANN (for what?), this idea of being a "non-profit" organization and immune from any commercial liability is becoming a bit of a farce, even to the most naive observer.

Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name

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