.io domains vs. .com domains -- from experience

Discussions
#1

I’m familiar with Paul Graham’s “weakness” theory of not having a .com for your product/service/company , but, for me, running a company where we make lots of products/services, naming has become more than a chore - I often dread starting on something new because it would mean having to find an available domain.

So the question is: anyone around here with a few years behind them of running a successful B2B .io where you can give some feedback, from experience, as to whether not having a .com was realistically/honestly detrimental in some way?

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#2

I would say that not having a .com hasn’t ruined Honeybadger, but we did have to say “dot-I-O” at the end of the name all of the time in the early days. :slight_smile:

Issues with the IO TLD, though, have caused us a few headaches. I agree with the recommendation from Stream – if you are running an API-intensive business, don’t use IO for your API traffic. We will be migrating our API traffic to .com, and perhaps even our user-facing site, too.

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#3

I know a guy who started his business on a .io TLD. First thing he did once he became decently profitable was to buy the .com version of it. He said it was absolutely worth the ~$15k he spent.

I think .io is fine for starting up, testing a MVP - but once things get serious a .com is definitely more respected.

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#4

My only concern, if the .com is not available, is that the name has been trademarked/copyrighted.

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#5

Anyone see anything about domain reliability for other non-.com domains? I wonder how .co fairs for example.

#6

The comments to that posting make it clear it is not the TLD per se, but the company that manages it. So *.co is as reliable as *.com as long as equally good companies manage them.

The risk is not that big. Even the described horror-horror was only a partial outage. Once a browser resolves the IP via one of healthy DNS servers, it caches it, and the problem is resolved for that user for an hour or so.

For APIs, especially where you provide your own JS (or any other) library it is easy to add a fallback to a secondary domain under another TLD.

#7

Yeah that was my understanding but I don’t really know much about the
companies.

Def not making any changes right now and all our most important products
are .com anyway.

#8

I have a .io domain, basically because the .com is already registered but unused. I never thought that a certain TLD could have those problems. :open_mouth: