What are Reserved Domains?

Domains pre-registered by an official entity for a specific purpose

What are Temporary Reserved Domains?

Typically, these are domains with a temporary hold on new registrations.

What are Reserved TLDs?

Top-level domains with a permanent reservation that prevents registration; used exclusively for test and simulation, and are unresolvable on the live internet.

"generic restricted Top-Level Domains" require proof of affiliation or eligibility in order to be registered.

"sponsored Top-Level Domains" require proof of affiliation or eligibility and are sponsored by a specific organization or community.

"test Top-Level Domain" refers to the .test domain, which is unresolvable on the live internet.

These are an alternative to tradional domains. They are built on blockchain technology and offer self-ownership and control.

A prefix added to the main domain name to partition the main website (e.g., en.example.com and se.example.com represent the English and Swedish sections of example.com, respectively).

Understanding Domains

Icons representing common domain name extensions (i.e., TLDs) such as .com, .net, .org, .info, .co, and .co.uk — Top-Level Domains

Think of a domain name as being analagous to the street address of a building, and where it is hosted as the actual building. A domain name consists of two parts — the Second-Level Domain, which is usually tied to your company name or purpose, and the Top-Level Domain (TLD), typically chosen on the basis of target audience, whether you want to be associated with a specific geographic region by search engines (a practice known as geotargeting}, and of course… availability. There are also exceptions to these naming conventions, Google and Yahoo being the most obvious. To aid understanding, in the sections that follow we will do an in-depth review of domains and TLDs.

What are TLDs?

As already mentioned, TLD stands for Top-Level Domain (e.g., the .com in example.com), also known as domain extension. There are several types of TLDs, and we will get into each in a bit more detail, including why we might choose one over the other.

What are gTLDs?

gTLDs or generic Top-Level Domains are a category of TLDs not tied to or associated with a specific country or geographic region. gTLDs can be used by anyone anywhere. Perhaps the most recognizable gTLDs are .com, .net, and .org. There are many others however, intended to appeal to special interest groups. For example, .club, .family, .social… there is even .democrat and .republican!

What are ccTLDs?

As implied by their name, ccTLDs or country code Top-Level Domains are associated with a particular country or geographic region, as defined by the ISO 3166 standard. There are exceptions however to an otherwise straightforward and easy to understand international standard. For example, .ai, .cc, .fm, .io, .me, and .tv are assigned to Anguilla, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, British Indian Ocean Territory, Montenegro, and Tuvalu respectively, are available for registration anywhere and are treated as gTLDs. To further muddy the waters, there are ccTLDs that are allowed to be registered anywhere without regard to geographic location, but that are not treated as gTLDs; for example, .tw, the official country code for Taiwan, is available for registration globally yet is still geotargeted to East Asia. This is an important distinction, because if you have a business or SIG that is international in scope but uses a .tw TLD, search engines will either not show your site in search results originating from outside that geographic area, or show it but prioritize it lower than gTLDs and ccTLDs within the country or geographic area denoted by the TLD.

How to Choose?

Defining by example is perhaps the clearest way to decide. Suppose you have an online bakery site for Indian cuisine that ships anywhere in the world, and you want to rank in the top-3 on a Google search. The obvious way would be to get a descriptive domain name with a generic TLD such as example-bakery.com. That would give you worldwide visibility is searches, but reaching the top-3 will take time as well as quality incoming links to your site. Another way might be to get a second domain… a .in, .co.in, or .int.in ccTLD (these are country codes for India), and then do a redirect to the primary .com address. This combination will give you worldwide search visibility on the .com and preferential treatment on the *.in address for searchers from India or searches specifying "India" or "Indian" in the search phrase. There is a third possibility… India is part of a select group of countries that also has as IDN TLD, which is .भारत. A domain with that TLD is likely to be highly prioritized in relevant searches, but is probably only worthwhile if you expect orders from India or from individuals with Hindi set as their default language.

And the answer is…

Actually, there is no clear-cut answer. Decide what you want to accomplish and when you want to accomplish it by. Then take that information and check to see what second-level and top-level domain combinations are available for your chosen domain name keyword. If you are unable to find an acceptable match available, you can also do a synonym search or use a tool like the Name Generator.

Anything Else?

As previously mentioned, there are IDN TLDs, i.e., TLDs that include or are entirely composed of non-Latin characters. A complete list of these internationalized TLDs is available online.

There are other domain types, such as…

Reserved Domains: These are domains that exist but cannot be registered. WHAT?! That’s right, they cannot be registered by anyone or any entity because they are reserved by official organizations, registries, or governments for specific purposes. For example, example.com, example.net, and example.org are reserved for use in educational materials, etc.
Temporary Reserved Domains: These domains may be temporarily reserved for the benefit of trademark holders when a new TLD is released. For example, when the .bank TLD was launched, thousands of domain names (i.e., Second-Level Domains) were placed on hold as a security mechanism to prevent potential abuse to trademark holders.
Reserved TLDs: The IETF has permanently reserved .example, .invalid, .localhost, and .test for simulation purposes, in that they are made to be non-resolvable on the live Internet.
grTLDs: These TLDs are overseen by ICANN and require proof of affiliation or eligibility in order to register them. For example, .nyc and .pro, are for the exclusive use by bonafide entities within or a strong connection to New York City, or by licensed professionals, respectively.

sTLDs: Like the grTLDs (above), sponsored TLDs require proof of eligibility before they can be registered. What’s different is that sTLDs are sponsored by a specific organization or community besides having specific eligibility requirements. The .asia domain has the loosest requirement — they can be registered by anyone anywhere, but at least one of the registrant contacts (which can be an individual or a legal entity) must have a connection to the Asia-Pacific region such as an Asian passport or citizenship, or legal representation within the region. The table below summarizes the constituant TLDs.

sponsored TLDs
TLD	Eligibility	Sponsor
.aero	Air/Transport industry	SITA
.asia	Asia/Pacific region	DotAsia Organisation Ltd.
.coop	Cooperative associations	DotCooperation LLC
.edu	U.S. institutions of higher education	Educause
.gov	U.S. federal, state, & local governments	CISA
.int	International treaty-based organisations	IANA
.jobs	Human resource managers	IANA
.mil	U.S. Military entities	DISA
.post	Postal services	Universal Postal Union

tTLD: This abbreviation is intentionally not plural as it refers to but a single TLD, .test. As you may have guessed, this is used for testing purposes. Like the Reserved TLDs (above), .test is non-resolvable on the Internet.
Special-use TLDs: Typically used on dark web websites and only accessible using the TOR browser or similar. Currently there are few special-use TLDs, .onion, .alt, and to a lesser degree, .i2p. Further information on the .onion TLD is available online. The .alt TLD has been approved for non-DNS contexts but is not in common use on the dark web.
Web3 TLDs: These are an emerging technology whereby instead of being managed by a central authority (which is typical for traditional domains), they are part of public blockchains, allowing users to own and control their domain names directly. There are both pros and cons to this system however. For example, Web3 domains offer increased security due to their decentralized nature and self-ownership. But… because they are decentralized and self-owned, there are compatibility issues with the mainstream internet.
Subdomains: These differ from second-level and top-level domains in that their use is optional and they do not have to be purchased or registered separately. For example, the 'www' that we used to always see as a domain prefix is actually a subdomain. The www subdomain is used less now since having a single website resolve as both www.example.com and example.com for instance, can have negative search engine implications. However, subdomains are still very much in use for situations where a single web page or a portion of a website is devoted to a specific purpose or client — e.g., blog.example.com, or on our own site… rd.thewholeinternet.com, which causes an intercept page to appear that gives the user a choice of proceeding to an external site, proceeding in a new browser tab, or going back.

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