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  • Hacker News
  • I thought .dev and .app would be more popular actually. The rapid increase in .ai makes sense though.
    by CollinEMac
  • From personal experience .dev is a little weird. For one thing its on the HSTS preload list, enforcing https. You cannot make a http://... request to a .dev domain from most browsers. I found this out the hard way after trying to use .dev for... development.
    by 405126121
  • At the end of the day, .com will still remain the most valuable and all startups will grow up into buying a .com
    by rvz
  • Counter-example: Alphabet doesn't have alphabet.com
    by benatkin
  • .st is cool because they allow US-legal content and it's pretty cheap. I don't think it will be popular with companies but I like it for personal sites.
    by Cider9986
  • Oh, they allow US-legal content, do they?

    Can you name some domains that do not?

    What makes "US-legal content" particularly cool to you?

    by ButlerianJihad
  • .com is evergreen but it's more and more difficult to get good .com names

    I wouldn't call this 'abandoning .com' though

    it's basically still .com dominated with a good chunk .ai

    and I guess the ones with good .com are keeping the .com

    by tosh
  • They will certainly buy the .com once they reach a certain level of stability.
    by FlamingMoe
  • it will be much more expensive by then.
    by andriy_koval
  • .ai is the new .io but nothing will beat .com. Even Paul Graham has said that.
    by codegeek
  • Lest we forget, the PG essay: https://paulgraham.com/name.html
    by nadis
  • .com — in RFC 920, it originally meant 'commercial.' But come to think of it, a lot of recent startups seem to be selling things that aren't really commercial at all. So maybe they're actually heading in the right direction.
    by jdw64
  • Is non .com/.org, and hyphens still haram? I registered a new domain last week; I went with non-hyphenated .com. More verbose than ideal, but I chose based on my previous understanding.

    I remember .ly was a thing for a while, then the tech companies would do *ly.com instead.

    by the__alchemist
  • If you take .ai out of it, .com is still dominant.
    by Grombobulous
  • These vanity ccTLDs are crazy to me. ".ai" is a fake gTLD. I bet that many users and possibly even some admins do not understand that it belongs to a tiny island nation.

    For years, Twitter used ".ly" and it was not widely known that this belonged, ultimately, to Libya. The other ccTLDs, such as .io and .co, have certain "nerd cachet" and people think the occupants are cool, until the rug is pulled and they need to reckon with the fact that all registrants were actually cybersquatters and victims of rampant capitalism.

    My advice to any startup that can't get a .com, is to find a legitimate gTLD that you can occupy. Even ".us" is available to anyone in the USA. I do not understand the shame, or reluctance, to occupy space in ".us". Why is it so rare? Do you hate America? Seriously, do you hate her so much, you can't live here with her in cyberspace?

    If you choose a ccTLD and you become attached to it, or your customers become attached to it, or your software is attached to it, someday you will need to face the music when Genovia is invaded, or transfers its sovereignty to someone who wants to enforce Genovian supremacy on the Internet.

    by ButlerianJihad
  • Exactly, and nothing will ever match the "prestige" of .com

    .ai is also kind of cool right now but it will probably lose its appeal after some years when everything will become AI and the world will get tired of the term.

    But .com is still at the top of the food chain. If you can survive for a few years, raise your series A/B, you will likely have enough money to acquire your sexy single-word .com name.

    by mojuba
  • "A recent YC startup spent 250k on a domain. I was slightly shocked. But when I asked how much they raised after YC, the answer was 6.5m. So 1/26 of their round. This is the time we live in; one shocking number counterbalances the other."

    https://x.com/paulg/status/2083628660708561075

    Was that a .xyz?

    by cma
  • Which gTLDs are reliable besides the classics (com, net, org,...)? By that I mean that the TLD owner won't screw you over a few years from now, for example by raising prices?

    I kind of like the idea to use .com for the marketing site, and .app for the actual web-app.

    by CodesInChaos
  • > YC startups are abandoning .com

    They are not "abandoning" .com domains. They are just really hard to find available or cheap enough to buy, so they launch with something else instead!

    .com will always be king

    by vlucas
  • Agreed, this is just a way to save cash until it makes sense to buy the actual desired tld .com from the current owner
    by 4d4m
  • Maybe. Still wild to find startups getting millions can’t afford to buy a .com domain
    by charlieyu1
  • Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded.
    by khy
  • Bingo. either you bough a .com a while ago or you have to pay a lot.

    A while ago we had the .ly domains. Now .ai. Things change depending on "fashion" if you can call it that.

    by manueltgomes