This site lives at a .hosting domain name. Not because I didn’t have any suitable .com domain names to use, but because I chose to use an appropriate domain. And by domain I mean the whole thing ie. both sides of the dot. So it made sense, as I pointed out, to opt for a new TLD, as the domain extension itself holds meaning. Real meaning.
By day we try to sell domains and hosting. New TLDs are probably not the easiest of sells, and that’s being diplomatic! If you’re going to sell something new and funky then you should believe in it too.
Does that mean that I believe new TLDs are “the” answer to anything? Hell no. But they can and should be used when appropriate. And “usage” doesn’t have to be for a full site, it can be simply a pointer at an existing site or section of one.
Personally I hold a couple of hundred domain names across ccTLDs, gTLDs and new gTLDs, while the company probably has as many if not more.
We don’t use all of them actively, some are just “pointers” to our main site.
However we do use quite a few new TLD domain names for specific things:
- Blacknight.press for our press releases and media mentions
- Blacknight.tech our offsite technical site where we post about service issues
- Blacknight.cloud we offer cloud based services .. lots of them!
- TrailBlazers.irish highlights some of the early adopters of .irish domain names
- DublinMeeting.irish which we set up prior to the ICANN meeting in Dublin to share tips etc., with attendees
- blacknight.video which takes you to our video channel on YouTube (for now)
- Blacknight.christmas for the moment our Christmas opening hours (needs to be updated for 2015)
Personally I’m using a few for various little projects..
- CEO.hosting – this site
- BusinessTravel.tips – my business travel blog
- Mneylon.social – pulls in / aggregates all my social media in one place
- Michele.pics – points at my personal Flickr account (they don’t support domains for some stupid reason!)
- Michele.irish – my Tumblr account
- Michele.Christmas – my Christmas card 🙂 (needs to be updated for 2015!)
Some of these are “proper” sites with plenty of original content, while others (including ones I haven’t listed above) just point to something else.
I’ve now got, for example, email on both michele.irish and ceo.hosting and I also setup the email for ceo.hosting on Office 365, as I wanted to see how well it worked (more on that in a separate post).
The key thing is usage.
Domains by themselves are absolutely pointless. And unless people and businesses use them in some fashion people won’t follow suit. (At least that’s my theory and I’ll stick to it for now!)