Which one would you choose for your site? Why do you prefer it?
In early 2000s was annoyed with having to switch between mail providers depending on fees introduced, so decided to go with something that was agnostic and as a domain name was rented at least on my terms.
1. Common TLD. Most annoying thing today is others want it. Not a very common first or last name in themselves, but in combination quite a common match.
2. Unusual TLDs. No idea, however having a name.co could well be mis-typed/remembered as a .com depending on your audience. Don't know. Don't assume other people are as savvy as you.
3. Friends with far more common names have done creative but also somewhat agnostic stuff, like '1'insertfirstnamehere.com. This is less likely to be mistyped, as the name is obvious as is the extension.
Just throwing some ideas outside of pure TLD.
I'm sort of confused. You state that your first name and last name are not common. That is, there is a low probability some random person has the same first name as you, and also a low probability some random person has the same last name as you. We can write that as follows:
P(N_f = F, N_l = *) < X
P(N_f = *, N_l = L) < X
P(N_f = F, N_l = L) > X
It should be obvious this is not possible.
For example, meet a 'Jones'. There's a good probability that his first names is 'Thomas'.
Meet a 'Thomas'. There's a low probability his last name is 'Jones'.
That's because 'Jones' is predominantly Welsh in origin, and 'Thomas' is a pretty liked given name in Wales. This of course would be more true in Wales than people of Welsh ancestory living far from Wales. And perhaps despite and because of the great singer Tom Jones, this combination may have fallen over the past few decades.
However, my family name is pretty location-specific in the UK, and even the diaspora of the name that went to places like North America tended to keep up traditional, albeit 2-3 centuries later.
Another example of non-independence would be a name like 'Ahmed' as given name and 'Zhang' as family name. 'Zhang' is an extremely common family name on a global scale, as is 'Ahmed' as a given name. However the possibility of 'Ahmed' and 'Zhang' overlapping as a combination is slim. Perhaps it could happen in Singapore or Malaysia, but then even 'Zhang' is probably converted to a Hokkian/Hakka/Cantonese equivalent spelling, which is not 'Zhang'. Given the scale of these names, I'm sure there 'Ahmed Zhang's knocking around, but probably not that many.
The great thing about statistics is it is about discovery, not assumptions.
And assuming everything is nice easy math, independent, or stochastic, is one of the greatest mistakes we can all make when looking at numbers.
The one problem I've found it's that it's seriously long to type and my surname is very prone to typos from people used to the American spelling instead of German.
Nobody has tried to buy it from me yet.
I wanted lastname with my local TLD but my father beat me to it :P and my uncle shares my initial and has initial+lastname registered.
I also like to use wildcards. hn@firstnamelastname.com goes to my single mailbox, but with headers intact.
Can really where the spam and affiliate stuff comes from, especially over the years, not just a few weeks.
tried the name domains but I have a stupid long four-part name...
Kind of interested with those odd domains like .us was $3.00 before, but I think that's a promotional first time buyer thing.
Maybe the VPS argument doesn't make sense, almost $60/yr I think it was $40 something that bulk-buy discount sort of thing.
I love it but it's hard incredibly hard to explain to customer sercice reps or family members that "no, not .com or anything, just my last name with a period before the last two letters."
The learning is that, with dot com domains, the rules of domain registration and expiry are more well established. The other tlds can and do change these procedures. So do not go in expecting the same stuff that worked with dot com (esp. The edge cases) to work with other tlds.
.com -> FNAME@LNAME.COM email (People get impressed by this? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
.com or .tech -> For project stuff, I use .tech if .com is taken; .io also works :)
If it's meant to be customer facing, and your customers can't write a for loop, .com (or your country's equivalent) is really the only legitimate choice. SMBs trying to sell to mom and pop types with .io domains are needlessly alienating their customers.
If it's genuinely just for kicks, my favorites are the ones that spell out yourna.me or fabulo.us or the like.
People joke that I have a porn star's name, so I own rick.xxx, but I also own ricksteeledesign.com as a backup because that kind of thing isn't always appropriate.
I've purchased and maintain .coms for all of my kids and nieces and nephews. I've gotten sites up with birth announcements for most of them within minutes of being born (didn't know sex/name until birth for all of them). I have had to purchase one .net domain, as the .com was unavailable.
It still seems like the .com is the best way to go, if available. I think .net is good. Best vanity extension for a name is .me, I believe, if preferable options are not available.
Last year I moved to Finland, and on a whim I saw that steve.fi was due to expire in a couple of months. I figured since I was in Finland now I could claim that - and was lucky enough to grab it.
In conclusion: For a company/service the suffix matters, but for a personal site? I figured that people would get their via google, probably, but if not that it should reflect my name - which is a little selfish, but seemed more memorable.
- free, no periodic fees for the registry entry
- natural content quality metric, if people do bother to download&run TBB or at least use some public www->onion gateway, not to mention writing down/remembering the address
- easy to self-host in a variety of conditions
I also owned FNAME.space, FNAME.tech and FNAME.xyz but never got around to switching my site to one. In hindsight, FNAME.space would be super chill.
But honestly, for a personal site, it really doesn't matter that much unless you already have a personal 'brand' to maintain.
I'd choose something that is easy to say over the phone for my target audience (if you're going to use it for email too)
I've seen a lot of people using .me for their personal site as well. Not many use .io because it's costlier compared to other extensions.
Haven't really used it for much but am soon planning to transfer from my university email to {FInitial}@ for professional email and me@ for personal email.
Many domains are still available and the cost is decently low (in comparison to some of the other especially new TLDs), only something like €30/year.
Most commonly used username for GitHub, BitBucket, stackoverflow, or any other networks/websites.
Not using them... But don't want others to have them.
Wikipedia says its for personal use.