Small business domain names - What types are there?

Once you have chosen a suitable domain name for your company, you should check its availability with a domain name supplier – a search for your desired domain name will bring back a series of available domain name types.

We have listed the key domain name types below:

Domain Name Types

• co.uk – the standard UK domain name suffix (essential).
• com – the most popular domain suffix on earth (essential).
• org – organisational domain suffix, global.
• net – short for ‘network’, but used by a variety of websites.
• org.uk – used by organisations such as charities.
• plc.uk - used for UK public limited companies.
• info – a new domain suffix, short for information provider.
• me.uk – individual domain name suffix.
• ltd.uk – used for UK limited companies.
• biz – relatively new domain, a shortened version of ‘business’.
• tv - unsurprisingly, short for "television" - used by many broadcasters.
• eu - European Union suffix.
• mobi - For sites delivering services to mobile devices

Ideally, you should secure both of these simultaneously. We've always recommended getting hold of the .net and .org names to protect your business identity. These are next in line of the most popularly registered domain name type.

You might also want to secure some of the other domain name suffixes to prevent other companies from buying variations of your website name in the future.

New variants are invented all the time, so as long as you've got the most important ones, it really is up to you if you want to buy up all possible variants of your domain name identity. Each different domain you buy will cost extra, so think hard whether it's worth buying the less common suffixes.

Of the newer batch of domain name variants, .info has been the most successful, with 4m .info names being registered by March 2007.

If you want to pick up some of the other domain name types on this list, we recommend Easily. We've used them since 1999 for all our domain name needs.

For ideas on choosing a good domain name try our Top 10 business domain name tips.