What TLDs to use if you cannot snatch a .com ?
Which ones are professional and generally well perceived?
I always go .gay myself.
Straight to the point, I like it.
Maybe not straight…
*To the point! Habits die hard.
You could perhaps use the TLD of your country.
If you are a dentist then go for .dentist
.io, .org, and .app are pretty good.
.xyz for fun ideas.
.dev for the obvious
.corp if you are an incorporated company in the US.
I’ve heard that .ml is really popular right now.
.com, .org, and .net are three old TLDs that are considered general purpose nowadays. I still feel that they have the most “cachet” as well as long-term stability. On top of that, from what I recall when I was looking with a similar question, I found out that many of the other TLDs have much more stringent rules about various stuff that can result in your losing the domain name if you violate them. For instance, .io doesn’t allow porn, some others (I don’t remember which exactly, but a lot of them) have strict rules against copyright infringement / piracy, and so on and so forth. In the end I decided that .com, .org, and .net were still the best gTLDs for me. They also generally have some of the best pricing for domain names, with a few exceptions.
If you decide to go with one aside from those three (or any of them, really), I recommend researching not only the rules of that TLD, but also the background of the registrars to try to get an idea if they seem like they’ll be around for the long haul and know what they’re doing.
Edit: I should have said registries instead of registrars above. I also found the original article where I learned some of this stuff about which TLDs offer better protections for domain owners, from the EFF: https://www.eff.org/wp/which-internet-registries-offer-best-protection-domain-owners
I wanted my last name.com but that was parked by someone asking for “upwards of 6 figures” so I got it .org and use it as my email on my resume.
But depends on what you’re doing with it. Com, net, org are generally all the most recognized and most well perceived. But if you’re looking to run a business, I’d say it depends on the business. A lot of modern and smaller tech companies are going for relevance rather than recognition, but if you put “burgershopname.food” on a billboard, it won’t be clear that it’s the website. On the flip side, if your target market is online ads, it’d be easier to link users via a clickable link or focus on SEO to get your link to come up that the domain name won’t even matter.
