which is the best for an international, worldwide website?
.IO
or
.CO
?
I can buy either and do not want to buy both with ongoing domain reg fees.
Matt.
What’s your need? .io, although it was originally a location-oriented domain, is more of a tech thing at the moment, drawing obviously from “Input/Output”.
.co is more of just a “company” or simply a short form of “.com” as far as I’m aware. Either is fine. If you’re tech oriented, I’d be tempted to do .io though. If not, probably .co.
.io does not allow private registration. So if that’s something you care about, make sure you take that into consideration before jumping in.
I think both work fine.
Due to registry restrictions, WhoisGuard cannot be used with .asia, .bz, .ca, .cn, .uk, .co.uk, .de, .eu, .in, .io, .me.uk, .nu, .li, .ch, .fr, .sg, .com.sg, .org.uk, .us, .es, .com.es, .nom.es, .org.es, .com.au, .net.au, .nyc or .org.au domains.
Technically, .io is the British Indian Ocean Territory, and .co is Columbia, although as @jeffreylees says, both are used more generally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.co
So with either, there is a theoretical risk that the country concerned will choose to change the requirements for registering those domains, although at the moment that seems unlikely.
there is a theoretical risk that the country concerned will choose to change the requirements for registering those domains
Do/can open registration type domain extensions get restricted often, or ever? Out of curiousity, I’ve never heard of that. If so, that alone might be enough to make me stay away, although to be honest, I suppose that would make NO extension safe.
So if that’s something you care about
I have this on my list to blog about. There’s some interesting things to note about domain privacy.
.io belongs to British Indian Ocean Territory
.co belongs to Colombia
in both cases it is up to the owner what they allow it to be used for when.
Country specific domains can have any rules applied to them that the owning country wants. Some countries often change the rules that apply to sub-domains of their country domain while others rarely do so.
I’d love to see a few more two-letter domains opened up; one’s that are not tied to a country, so removing the risk that an owner can restrict use. For reasons that should be obvious, I’d like to see .is on the list of domains I could choose from.
This is an interesting article I read while fact checking. Worth reading if considering a .io
Some countries often change the rules that apply to sub-domains of their country domain while others rarely do so.
This, unfortunately, is just restating basically what @technobear said, that there’s a risk. Maybe a better way for me to phrase my question - has there ever been a change in a common TLD’s usage rules that resulted in, say, droves of sites suddenly ceasing to operate because they’re in violation of the new rules ex post facto? That seems like a really unlikely thing for TLD maintainers (in this case, a British company called Internet Computer Bureau (ICB), unless the Brits lose ownership) to do, yes?
Hah, you gonna jump on that one as fast as you can?
Yup
I don’t know - and I would also be interested in the answer.
Not really – it only applies to small countries who have “desirable” TLDs and sell them internationally (like .co, .tv, .fm and so on), who could choose to put a tariff on foreign registrations. I’m not aware that it has happened, it’s probably not likely to happen, but I wouldn’t want to trust the security of my website to the whims of the current or potential future governments of countries like Tuvalu and Micronesia.
It won’t be an issue for genuine international domains such as .com, .net or .org, because those are regulated by ICANN, and the chances of it being an issue for genuine country-based domains such as .*.uk or .fr, where your business is specifically aimed at those countries, are negligible.
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As Tuvala is sinking and soon will no longer exist as a physical location who knows what will happen to the actual country in the future - if the country ceases to exist then it will no longer be entitled to a country level domain name.
There have been country level domains withdrawn in the past when the country they were allocated to ceased to exist (such as Yugoslavia). I don’t know what happened to the existing domains at that time but presumably no more could be created and presumably there was some sort of restriction on renewals as well.
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