Domain extension guide

1. Search for an ending, or a word — try 'renewal', 'restricted' or your trade.
2. Filter by how the ending reads to a customer: normal, deliberate, or suspicious.
3. Filter by renewal price band. This is the renewal, not the first-year offer.
4. Filter by whether anyone can register it or whether it requires a connection or a licence.
5. Read the note on each survivor — it is the single most useful thing to know before choosing.

Try filtering to reads as normal, restricted, and cheap. Almost nothing survives, and that is the real finding: verification costs registries money, and they charge for it.

People type .com without being told. Say your domain out loud to someone and a meaningful proportion will append .com regardless of what you actually said, because thirty years of habit is a strong prior. That is the whole argument, and it is a good one.

It matters most for businesses whose name travels by voice, which is nearly all local businesses — recommended over a fence, read off a van, said on a phone call. Every one of those interactions relies on the listener reconstructing the address from memory, and .com is what they reconstruct.

So when the exact match is taken, the usual best answer is a longer .com rather than a shorter something else. Add your town, add your trade, add a word — boiseriversideplumbing.com beats riverside.plumbing for a business whose customers hear the name before they see it.

The exception is a business whose customers arrive by clicking rather than typing: they find you through a map listing, a directory, a social profile, a link. For those, the ending matters considerably less, and a distinctive alternative can be worth having.

There is a pattern in the trust column worth noticing. The endings that read as most credible are almost all the ones with a genuine eligibility requirement: .law needs a verified licensed professional, .bank needs a verified institution, .ca and .au need a real presence in the country, .nyc needs an address in the city.

That is not a coincidence. An ending anyone can register at any price carries no information about the registrant, so it can carry no trust. An ending that required someone to prove something tells a reader that a check happened.

The practical consequence is that a restricted ending you qualify for is often worth more than an unrestricted one that sounds better. A local business on a restricted city or country ending is signalling something checkable, which is rare and cheap.

It also explains why the cheap unrestricted endings sit in the risky category. It is not snobbery about .xyz — it is that near-zero registration cost with no checks attracts bulk abuse, and some corporate mail filters block them outright, which means your invoices may silently not arrive.

The first-year price of a domain is a marketing number. Registrars discount it heavily, sometimes to a dollar, because acquiring a customer who will renew for a decade is worth far more than the first year's margin. This is normal and not deceptive on its own.

What catches people is the size of the gap. Plenty of endings sell for a couple of dollars in year one and renew at forty or fifty — and renewal is automatic by default, so the first you know is a card charge you did not expect. Newer generic endings and the fashionable ones are the worst for this.

So the price band shown here is the renewal band, deliberately. Before you register anything, find the renewal price on the registrar's own pricing page rather than the checkout, and multiply it by ten. That is the real cost of the decision, because a domain you build a business on is a domain you keep.

One more thing worth checking at the same time: the transfer-out policy and whether privacy protection costs extra. Both are cheap to establish now and irritating to discover later.

Endings like .plumbing, .contractors and .photography are genuinely memorable in speech, and they let the short part of your domain be just your name — riverside.plumbing rather than riversideplumbingboise.com.

Two costs. They tend to sit in the premium renewal band, so the ten-year figure is meaningfully higher than a .com. And they commit you to one trade permanently, which is fine until the day you add a second one and your domain contradicts your services page.

There is also an adoption question that nobody can answer confidently. These endings are not unfamiliar to customers exactly, but they are not automatic either — some people will still type .com, and you cannot know what proportion for your particular audience.

The pragmatic position: if you go with one, register the equivalent .com too if it is available and cheap, and redirect it. That costs fifteen dollars a year and removes the entire category of problem.

Price. Registrar pricing changes constantly, varies by promotion, and differs between registrars for the same ending. The bands here are orientation, and the only authoritative number is the renewal price on the registrar's page today.

Eligibility. Registry rules change, and several endings have quietly tightened or loosened their requirements over the years. Where we are unsure, the entry says to check rather than guessing — which is less satisfying and more useful.

Perception. The trust column is an editorial judgement about how a typical customer reads an ending, not data. It is also context-dependent in a way a column cannot capture: a well-known business on a .xyz suffers nothing, and a brand-new one does. Read it as a prior, not a verdict.

What this guide genuinely cannot do at all is tell you whether a name is available. That needs a registrar lookup, and any tool claiming otherwise is guessing.