Many people have their personal website which may be a blog or a project homepage and there are also several awesome domain extensions for us to choose from, such as .me, .io, .info and .tech.<p>Which one would you choose for your site? Why do you prefer it?
Depends strongly on the purpose of the page.<p>If it's meant to be customer facing, and your customers can't write a for loop, .com (or your country's equivalent) is really the only legitimate choice. SMBs trying to sell to mom and pop types with .io domains are needlessly alienating their customers.<p>If it's genuinely just for kicks, my favorites are the ones that spell out yourna.me or fabulo.us or the like.<p>People joke that I have a porn star's name, so I own rick.xxx, but I also own ricksteeledesign.com as a backup because that kind of thing isn't always appropriate.
I believe the biggest consideration is how readable, understandable and pronounceable the domain and extension will be. It's not something you want to be clever about, particularly if you will host your email there.<p>I've purchased and maintain .coms for all of my kids and nieces and nephews. I've gotten sites up with birth announcements for most of them within minutes of being born (didn't know sex/name until birth for all of them). I have had to purchase one .net domain, as the .com was unavailable.<p>It still seems like the .com is the best way to go, if available. I think .net is good. Best vanity extension for a name is .me, I believe, if preferable options are not available.
I would always go with a dot com site. I owned a MYNAME.me site hoping to shift to it one day. Never got around to it. When a year passed, the domain expired without warning. In case of a dot com domain, there is period of suspension for a month before the domain expires and goes back to the pool. During that period, you cannot use the domain but you still can renew the domain and no one else can register it.<p>The learning is that, with dot com domains, the rules of domain registration and expiry are more well established. The other tlds can and do change these procedures. So do not go in expecting the same stuff that worked with dot com (esp. The edge cases) to work with other tlds.
.co.uk -> personal blog and homelab stuff<p>.com -> FNAME@LNAME.COM email (People get impressed by this? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )<p>.com or .tech -> For project stuff, I use .tech if .com is taken; .io also works :)
i like the good old .net. for better or worse, the new ones don't have quite the same cachet as the traditional .com, .org and .net, and of the three .net seems the most fitting for a personal site.
firstname@firstnamelastname.com<p>In early 2000s was annoyed with having to switch between mail providers depending on fees introduced, so decided to go with something that was agnostic and as a domain name was rented at least on my terms.<p>1. Common TLD. Most annoying thing today is others want it. Not a very common first or last name in themselves, but in combination quite a common match.<p>2. Unusual TLDs. No idea, however having a name.co could well be mis-typed/remembered as a .com depending on your audience. Don't know. Don't assume other people are as savvy as you.<p>3. Friends with far more common names have done creative but also somewhat agnostic stuff, like '1'insertfirstnamehere.com. This is less likely to be mistyped, as the name is obvious as is the extension.<p>Just throwing some ideas outside of pure TLD.
I want a .io name but damn they're expensive... also can't pick a domain name... can't believe something seemingly random like pad91 exists... 91server... exists all redirect pages but man...<p>tried the name domains but I have a stupid long four-part name...
At the time I registered my domain the suffix was less important and interesting than the name itself. My name is 'Steve' so I wanted to have 'steve.xxx'. Sadly I missed out on the .com/.net/.org, but I did register steve.org.uk<p>Last year I moved to Finland, and on a whim I saw that steve.fi was due to expire in a couple of months. I figured since I was in Finland now I could claim that - and was lucky enough to grab it.<p>In conclusion: For a company/service the suffix matters, but for a personal site? I figured that people would get their via google, probably, but if not that it should reflect my name - which is a little selfish, but seemed more memorable.
.onion:<p>- free, no periodic fees for the registry entry<p>- natural content quality metric, if people do bother to download&run TBB or at least use some public www->onion gateway, not to mention writing down/remembering the address<p>- easy to self-host in a variety of conditions
I've chosen .xyz for my personal homepage because it was cheap, new and looks nice in my opinion. As good .com domains start to become rare I think .xyz has potential to become one of the next well-known general purpose domains.
I have a domain where the extension is the last two letters of my last name, like mill.er. It also gives me a pretty cool mail address, e.g. nick@mill.er.
I use .de for my personal site, but I had it for ages now. If I had something international, I'd take the one where a cool name is still available.
I have a relatively common name, which meant that any combination similar to firstlast.com or first-last.com was either taken or beyond my personal site budget. I chose the FirstnameLastna.me route. My last name ends in "is", so I ended up getting an Icelandic domain (Þakka þér ISNIC!). It makes it more interesting to me and always makes for a good story after sharing my portfolio.
I own a .co.uk for my personal site.
I did have a .uk for a while, but it serves no purpose when I already have .co.uk.<p>I also owned FNAME.space, FNAME.tech and FNAME.xyz but never got around to switching my site to one. In hindsight, FNAME.space would be super chill.<p>But honestly, for a personal site, it really doesn't matter that much unless you already have a personal 'brand' to maintain.
I think the general advice is too avoid extensions with shady business practices (so you don't end losing your domain). Other than that, I think we are over extensions having any meaning (.com business, .net providers, .org nonprofits, etc).<p>I'd choose something that is easy to say over the phone for my target audience (if you're going to use it for email too)
I'm using domainname.web.{my country TLD} because it's cheap (than .co and .net) and very popular for personal blog/site in my country (Indonesia). By the way, my country TLD is .id. The other reason why I chose it because I want to give a support. I mean let the world know that's my country TLD.
I own FirstnameLastname.com as well as Firstname-Lastname.com. I used to have a FirstnameLastname.info as well.<p>I've seen a lot of people using .me for their personal site as well. Not many use .io because it's costlier compared to other extensions.
First@Lastna.me<p>I love it but it's hard incredibly hard to explain to customer sercice reps or family members that "no, not .com or anything, just my last name with a period before the last two letters."
My blog, which was taken down a year ago, is a .com. I have a i.ng sitting around (African TLD) that I may use for a blog of some sort as it is cod.i.ng. I wanted codi.ng but it was taken.
I've got {FInitial}{LName}.me.<p>Haven't really used it for much but am soon planning to transfer from my university email to {FInitial}@ for professional email and me@ for personal email.
.io is the one I like to use.<p>Many domains are still available and the cost is decently low (in comparison to some of the other especially new TLDs), only something like €30/year.
I use {my-most-commonly-used-username}.com for my personal website.<p>Most commonly used username for GitHub, BitBucket, stackoverflow, or any other networks/websites.