> Stick with your national ccTLD unless it is managed by utter incompetents, in which case you have fallbacks like .eu for EU nationals, and .com, .net, .org and .info for the rest.

Disregarding the price factor for a moment, would you still prioritize "your own country's ccTLD" over .com, when registering web presence for a company with no particular local presence in its home country? I.e. should a Canadian-based company that mostly serves the US still prefer .ca to .com?

For that matter, does your advice apply to .us?

> would you still prioritize "your own country's ccTLD" over .com, when registering web presence for a company with no particular local presence in its home country?

1. Yes. It’s also a matter of marketing, of course, where the desire to have a .com might trump all other consideration.

2. If a company has no particular local presence in it’s home country, what would the concept of “home” country even mean?

The reason to prefer your own local ccTLD is to have an easier time dealing with any disputes or questions from your TLD registry. I.e. would the registry assume that they can simply contact you (and speak the local language) if anything should arise, then you will have an easier time dealing with that. If you were to be technically registered somewhere, but have no local people and no local presence, or even if your company merely seems to be of foreign origin, the TLD registry (and legal officials in general) might not deal with you very favorably.

By "local presence" I meant "markets itself to customers in that country." Especially in the digital age, a company can be "homed" in one country — have all its offices and employees there — but make a product/service that is only marketed (or even legal!) in another country.

First example that comes to mind: many of those shady crypto companies that did "ICOs" in 2017, were based in the US; but the US has regulations that block non-accredited US customers from investing in things like this. So these companies generally just ignored the US market — even blocking US visitors on their website — and instead marketed to people in every other country.

> should a Canadian-based company that mostly serves the US still prefer .ca to .com?

In this case it doesn't matter in terms of reliability. If you target the US, maybe go with .com, unless .ca brings something (if it's a pun, or if you want to highlight the fact you're a Canadian company).

Also consider the fact that the country's ccTLD is not popular in every country. In France the .fr is very popular for example, but it's not the case everywhere. I'm not sure the .us is very popular in the us for example, is it?

I don’t believe .us is very popular.

It's not. Also, WHOIS privacy is banned for .us domains, unlike .com domains.

> I would go further and simply recommend against any other weird gTLDs at all.

To be honest you're probably right, but considering it can be hard to find a good .com nowadays, I think going for a somewhat well managed newGTLD is a good option.

HOWEVER, doing the work of knowing which registry is reliable can be a bit hard when you're not in the industry yourself.

5ish years, here (though out of the industry for a bit). Why do you recommend against the new gTLDs?

1. The new gTLDs come and go, and sometimes even change ownership, AFAIK.

2. The rules can change somewhat arbitrarily. Or the rules might not change, but their enforcement might.

3. The registries have no incentive to treat their TLD management as a stewardship of a public good; they are in it for the money, and might de-prioritize technical development and/or support to arbitrarily low levels.

Running 10 gTLDs is about as hard as running 1 TLD. You already have the nameservers and the servers that handle registering domains, etc. Most of the rest of the work is done by registrars.

Further, TLDs are bought and sold periodically. I haven't seen any gTLDs go away. Is that something you've seen?

Otherwise, the concerns listed seem like FUD with no evidence so far.

I got stuck in a which domain to buy flip-flop recently.

.info feels like the most benign above.

But when I read them out, www and .com just feel like some relic from yester-year. But we have gotten used to them to the point we don't necessarily notice.