What’s better, .so or .io?
I’m trying to buy a domain and the .com is taken. Fortunately .so and .io are both available. Which would you choose?
I’m trying to buy a domain and the .com is taken. Fortunately .so and .io are both available. Which would you choose?
One of my most downvoted comment is when I spoke about domain name choices, it sticks with me each time I click on the comment box. But who cares, here's my opinion...
The domain space soocks! .rocks .books or .world .online or .800+ domain extensions out there. Trust me your visitors are going to forget you in a few months or even days. 100% gonna happen. If anyone is going to tell you "they'll remember", you're betting on it. If they say, "they'll bookmark", you're betting on it again.
There are times when I'm in need of a product and an Indie Hacker product comes to my mind, I immediately know I'm not gonna find it. I just try and try all the extensions I can remember and sometimes I find them but mostly I won't.
The folks I have handled projects with know only two extensions .com and their country extension and that's it. Other things I have read, which I'm not going to prove because I don't have the time:
Choose a .com. I know it is not easy to find but you're better off with a getProduct.com, tryProduct.com, runProduct.com, Producthq.com and others.
It is widely recognizable. Remember slackhq.com or thefacebook.com? You'll never know how much traffic you're losing unless you own both .com and .other domains.
Thanks for your feedback. Not sure why it would be downvoted, it’s very helpful.
Obviously .com is better but I spent a long time and couldn’t come up with a good name where a .com was available. The name I finally came up with was a short “nonsense” word which I’m worried doesn’t work well with “get” or “try” or “hq”. Slack and Facebook are real recognizable words so it works. But the name I ended up with is a cool short 4-letter nonsense work like atmi (that’s an example, not the real one). I kind of think atmi.io is more memorable than getatmi.com or tryatmi.com or atmihq.com ... because atmi is so short and not a real word, the get/try/hq makes it confusing to me. What do you think?
Also, the .com for my specific domain name idea is owned by a large company but they are not using it, so I’m hoping that one day if I make enough money I can buy it from them.
I can keep trying to think of a good .com but I’ve been trying to name my app for a couple months now and I think I just need to pick one and get on with it.
In this case, atmi.io is more memorable than other options like you said. atmi.so is also as memorable for this but you'll have to consider it's blocked in some workplaces if you chose the path.
Yeah, have to find the balance between picking and moving on, and spending the right amount of time when it comes to names.
We chose strikingdigital.com for our lead-gen SaaS because these 2 keywords ranked well, but as you can see it explains nothing about the brand and we heard about it again and again in our feedbacks. Now we're in the process of a costly rebrand to make it more recognisable and memorable.
Thanks for the feedback. In what way is rebrand costly?
I know some brand familiarity and word-of-mouth will be lost. But I thought rebranding would be more of an inconvenience than a real cost.
Inconvenience as a cost and expense on domain research, separate time spent on social media handles, hiring branding experts, designers, changing internal links, internal wiki and external ones, miscellaneous cost that would go onto fees and payments.
You needn't worry though. For us it was a total flaw because we tried to reinvent everything we touch. Trying to use custom cms for us, building a custom blogging engine for product blogging, taking a unconventional approach to branding among others were mistakes that we did and we've learnt from it. We can of course do the same and reduce teh costs but that would be valuable time against money.
Yeah, that's a lot of change, makes sense. Thanks for sharing your experience!
I feel like .io is more for products or websites targeting developers, or at least technical people.
Yes, I think that is true. But I have seen a growing number of startups and indie businesses with .io that aren’t targeting developers specifically so I’m not too worried.
Some examples would be coda.io or clubhouse.io
I think it depends on what you app/site is for. You should checkout expireddomains.net. You can look and browse though nearly every expired domain. I like reading though the list and seeing some FANTASTIC domains that are now for sale.
Thanks for the link!
For sure bud :)
I personally like .io but it really depends on what is available.
Thanks for your opinion!
It all depends on your exact niche. I found myself in the same predicament, and bought the .app domain
Good suggestion, thanks!
definitely .io unless your product is like a plugin or feature for Notion
👍
.co of course! Neat way to avoid paying a .com and still look the part 😀
Yes, I forgot to mention that .co is taken (but not being used). I'll try to reach out to see if I can buy it, but it will obviously be easier to just get a tld that's available. Thanks!
I've used elceef's dnstwist to try and help me come up with domain names in the past:
https://github.com/elceef/dnstwist/
or
https://dnstwist.it/
At the time, I was considering building a self-phishing service so I would've used them in phishing attempts but from an offensive security point of view.
I do like the idea of incorporating the TLD into your concept domain but I'm just not that clever.
Interesting resource, thanks for sharing!
I read an article somewhere saying that some startups are doing really well with some of the 'cool' new TLDs e.g. .rocks, .expert etc. Could be something to consider! In terms of the .so/.io thing, I honestly don't think it matters at all. Maybe .so is a bit sexier. My own startup is https://cloak.ist, I love having TLDs that are part of the startup's name.
There are definitely some big names using 'weird' TLDs, for instance https://linktr.ee.
Random question – are you really living in Rwanda (per your IH profile)? I just checked out your website and says you're from the UK. Sounds like there might be an interesting story there...
I am indeed living in Rwanda! My partner works here, so I'm doing Cloakist remotely from Kigali. (Not as interesting a story as you might have hoped, sorry!)
Still, sounds awesome. Everything I've seen about Rwanda looks beautiful, I'd love to visit someday.
What registrar do you use for .ist?
.ist not available on namecheap which is what I use.
Thanks!
Ah yeah - I used https://www.101domain.com/ which is pretty rubbish, but I immediately transferred my Nameservers to Cloudflare to have advanced DNS management tools.
I think it's quite cool to use TLDs not supported by GoDaddy and Namecheap - likely to be less competitive with names that remain available.
Cool, thanks!
Convention would say .io unless .so somehow resonates with the name.
I think you are right. Thanks!
How about .app? If it has to be between .so and .io, then .io is more recognizable.
The main problem I have with app is that I'm currently putting my web app which is a single-page application in a subfolder called /app
So https://example.app/app/ looks weird to me.
If I had a different tech stack where I could present different pages for https://example.app depending on whether the user was signed in, then I could have both the home page and the app at https://example.app
Someone on IH suggested putting the app at https://web.example.app but for now, I want to have the app and all the marketing content/documentation etc. on the same domain.
I think you are right that .io is more recognizeable than .so.
Thanks for your feedback!
Use a subdomain. We're using web.hero.app and it's awesome :)
Oh just saw that you don't want to do that. Nvm.
Well, it's possible for me to do that, so it's still a good idea to think about.
My current thinking is that I want the app and documentation on the same domain so that it's easier for me to deploy. I'm currently using one codebase in Gatsby for both the website and the web app. It wouldn't be too hard to separate it into two codebases and deploy them separately, but right now it's easier for me to just manage one code base.
Also, having both app and documentation on the same site let's me preload pages using Gatsby link leading to faster navigation.
Thanks!
That's fair, gatsby linking is definitely nice :)
I'd def go the subdomain route on .app if I were you, pretty awesome how easy it is to get an amazing .app domain right now given how much this tld is resonating with average users.
Hero.app looks great!
Awesome domain name too.
Thanks for the advice. I'll probably buy both .app and .io just in case!
Off the bat I don't know what .so represents (besides Somalia?).
Notion.so .... I'm not sure of the what the play on abbreviation is there, so I voted .io because of input/output and that's somewhat related to tech stuff.
Curious what .so is and could be convinced otherwise. It would also depend on subject/company/app you are buying it for.
.so is to solution as .io is to input/output.
Personally, I'll consider .io for Devs and .so for a more generic audience
Thanks for the reply – I'm working on a productivity app (task management, time tracking), and notion.so is actually where I first saw the .so domain.
.so is Somalia but .io is British Indian Ocean Territory ... I don't think the geography matters though (I could be wrong).
I think you're impression is right in that .io is more common and associated with tech, whereas .so is less common and maybe not understood.
Avoid ccTLDs like .so that might give you problems with SEO. Notion has enough backlinks and other ranking signals to overcome that, but for new product it's not a good idea. (Note that .io is a ccTLD too but it's part of an exception list.)
Wow, this is super helpful, thanks! I had no idea about ccTLDs or the exception list... learn something new every day 🙂
I guess .io it is! (It also clearly won the poll).
Thanks!!!
Agreed about the geography part, more does it play well with the product it's representing?
Domains are kind of fun, in that it can be creative to find the right fit and play within the options you have (domain poetry!), but it's also annoying because once you pick it's hard to go back.
"Domain poetry" - awesome :)
The domain name I have in mind is actually a short (4-letter) nonsense word so I think either will work. For example anki.so vs. anki.io