I have a couple of projects that are gaining traction, generating revenue, and slowly turning into a full-time job.<p>Recently, I saw a discussion on whether a dot io domain is really a good domain name for a business, which made me start thinking: do people still view companies running websites with a non-dot com domain to be any less worthy? All my projects run on a dot io domain, and I'm starting to wonder whether this choice would affect my business's creditability.<p>All my projects are aimed at businesses working in tech.
Personal experience - I tried one of the newer trendy domains, .shop, .store and .<you name it>. My results were underwhelming in marketing campaigns across facebook for E-Commerce related products when I A/B tested the new TLDs vs dot coms. The dot coms won over by a huge margin. My target demographic isn't old, mostly consists of millennials and younger.<p>The new TLDs are simply just over-hyped and over-priced. For example, some .app domains cost as much as $50. I suggest getting <youridea>app.com vs <youridea>.app.<p>I also don't recommend .co's in particular since they lead to a lot of typos .com's. Unless you control the .com, .co is a bad idea.<p>I wasted so much money with these hyped domains so much so that I'm starting to think it's borderline scam. I'll publish a medium article soon-ish.<p>Maybe they should pay us to use these new TLDs instead.
No you do not need a dot com, but you do need a <i>reliable registrar</i>. Since the domain name is your "storefront" your "corporate HQ" your "main campus" on the Internet, at some point you have to ask how sure are you that resolving your domain name will get you your servers going forward. There is a tremendous amount of security, monitoring, and protective layering around the .com root servers because they serve names that everyone depends on every day. On the 'lesser' domains you get stories like this : <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/io_hijacking_in_transition_cockup/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/io_hijacking_in_tra...</a> which is kind of scary.<p>Bottom line, from a customer acceptance perspective pretty much any domain name works, but from a corporate longevity perspective you need a TLD that isn't going to get hacked.
This might not apply to you, but if your business is country-specific, consider using the appropriate country code TLD (like .co.uk, .ca, .fi, .ru, etc.). In my experience, people are familiar with them and trust them the same as or more than .com.<p>For example, in Canada, I'm always a bit hesitant when I land on a .com website (is it USD or CAD?), but a .ca domain tells me I'm at the right place. Especially for multi-national companies like Amazon or The Home Depot.<p>I wouldn't use .us in the USA though—it doesn't seem to be very common, putting it in the same boat as .biz and all the other new ones. .com seems to be the de facto "US" TLD.
For your scenario, if you're exclusively targeting businesses customers, it's not nearly as important. It's a bonus if you have a good dotcom.<p>If you're a consumer focused company (doesn't sound like any of your projects are), then absolutely get as good of a dotcom address as you can find / afford.<p>A dotcom is still overwhelmingly the most desirable address, in all regards - <i>if</i> you have a good one. There is still no close second to a good dotcom address.
From what I've seen, other TLDs (.co, .io, .ai etc.) are perfectly acceptable nowadays, but more for informational or marketing sites. If the user is going to be spending a lot of time on your site for actual day-to-day usage, I'd still suggest .com.
One thing to note is that not all TLD will perform the same in email filters.<p>Especially when it comes to companies with strict email privileges, any TLD that used to be free (ie. .ml) may be filtered out and require a .com mirror. I worked at a startup that realized their emails were being flagged for spam because of the TOD, and it took a while to understand the issue was due to the TLD itself.
I think .io is fine for credibility, but you should own the .com to fight phishing. It's a security risk otherwise. Other non dot com domains are definitely less trustworthy, if you have a .co or God forbid a .biz that's not a good look. .io is definitely fine in tech, but do watch out for phishing.
My subjective perception leads me to believe that it's becoming less important. And for tech-oriented businesses, I think that's even more true. TLD's like .io, .ai, etc are becoming very accepted. In fact, for anything AI related, I'd probably prefer the .ai TLD.<p>That said, all things being equal, a .com domain is probably still the gold standard in many areas, and if the one for your name is available, and affordable, it wouldn't hurt to have it. You can always redirect traffic one way or the other, to whatever you consider the "main" domain.
It depends upon your target audience. A .com is still superior for a b2c e-commerce site, especially one that caters to a mainstream/casual audience. For a corporate site there is less reason to stick with .com, especially for anything related to technology.<p>.io is definitely trendy amongst engineers lately, and even newer domains like Google’s .dev, with high reputation, just appeared this year. Technically-minded audiences will see these as markers of credibility, if anything.
I don't think it matters at all anymore. Even .co is just as good enough.<p>Also the biggest reason why .com was considered a better alternative before was because of a seo myth that coms rank better. Now from your own experience and dozens of articles that myth too had been debunked.<p>So imo it really doesn't matter and people remember io just as well.
You can use almost any TLD for personal projects, though a few have support issues and should be avoided, like .vg.<p>For business use, some domains are poorly managed, like .io, and the registrar can be taken over or easily DoSed. These would not pass a vendor security audit, so stick with .com.