This is just a friendly reminder that just because something is newly available for purchase, or heralded as the next big thing, or advertised as eminently necessary, doesn’t mean you should buy it. This includes Snuggies, combination PB and J jars, and the .cloud extension.
A big part of naming in the 21st century concerns domain names, and ever since hundreds of new gTLDs hit the market, we’ve been helping folks decide what to invest in and what to ignore. And because folks often try to pounce on gTLDs as soon as they hit the market, I wanted to say it clearly, and ASAP. For the vast, vast majority of people and companies, the .cloud extension is rather like volcano insurance.
If you are someone who is wondering whether you need it, you don’t. If you need this domain, you’ll know it.
.Cloud is a fairly specific extension that could benefit a handful of big companies with cloud capabilities as one of their multiple offerings. It might make sense for Amazon to get Amazon.cloud so people can go directly to their cloud division. Or maybe you’re a big company who wants to use it internally so your own employees have an easy portal to access files from anywhere–that makes sense as well. If you are a startup whose business is not just on the cloud but about the cloud … maybe that works for you, but even then, wedding yourself to a .cloud URL will make it hard to grow and expand offerings beyond the cloud should you need or want to do that. Otherwise, if you already have a .com and don’t need the .cloud to be an internal portal, you’re fine just sitting pretty.
The release of .cloud has provided a good opportunity to remind folks—keep it simple, no need to fly off the Twitter-handle, as it were, with the gTLDs. At the prices Aruba is charging, which are modest, they will need cities of folks to adopt the extension to make good on their investment, but I just don’t see that happening. Or at least, it shouldn’t. Here at Catchword we’ve always felt that the .com extension is the Main Street of the internet—the cachet you gain from an intuitive .com URL is priceless. Beyond that, if you absolutely can’t get a .com, there are a few other generic extensions that are acceptable—namely .co, and perhaps .xyz and a handful of others. But unless you know you need a .cloud, or a .pizza or a .law or a .nyc … save your time and energy.
