Until now companies had it pretty easy. You choose a .com domain although if you were a British company you may have had to choose between a .co.uk as well. Times like that are gone now however. Now businesses have to pick between extensions including .biz for all companies and .us for US companies.

The problem is that nobody wants an unpopular extension and if dot biz does not take off many businesses could be stranded with a useless domain. Although dot biz are gradually becoming more popular and its not lucking like one that will fade out any time soon; although the best option is often to play it safe.

Dot biz problems

Domain extensions have been launched many times with the hope of climbing to the success of the dot com. But none of them have done and my guess is that none of them will do any time soon. To be popular you had to be quick off the mark.

Dot net and not org were popular as they are very widespread and .co.uk has done very well too as it was out well before it was all the crazy to bring out your own domain extensions for your country. Back when nobody hard heard of dot tv, dot ca and dot us, .co.uk were selling like hot cakes; making them very cheap helped too.

The problem is though that dot biz was not quick off the mark. And many of the big websites had already set up sites when the dot biz sales doors where opened for business. Many large corporations who could have promoted dot biz already had dot com's by then and were not about to change.

The dot com seems like the perfect extension too. It is spelt like it sounds, its not too short and its not too long. The problem with dot biz is that unless it becomes very popular people could easily confuse the spelling with bis. And no business wants some of its website traffic heading off to an address which does not exist.

Those names though

As will any new extension however people will be tempted by the fact they can get find a name shorter than a paragraph in length which hasn't been snapped up already. While people are cueing up on services like SnapBack to get stupidly long dot com domains, it's easy to find a great name that ends in dot biz.

There is no localisation on dot biz as with many other domains neither. For instance owning a dot us is great and your website visitors will love it - providing they all come from the US. But chances are they won't be, and people who don't live in the area your name is from could feel like an outsider. This is not a problem with names like dot tk as everyone feels like an outsider together ;). I mean how did an island that small get an internet connection let alone a domain name extension in the first place?

Conclusion

If your company name is available in a dot com then go for a dot com. Dot com is still and for a while yet will be the dominant name. However if you can't get it then a dot biz looks professional and chances are you can get your name. If so I recommend that you go for it. After all the dot biz popularity grows every time a registration is made.