Entrusted my domain name to a tiny island nation! — Oops, I

Firm using .st domain name learns a hard lesson.

The world takes .com’s uptime, along with that of many other TLDs run by sizable registries, for granted.

Consider the story of registration site Voost!, which uses the “clever” domain name voo.st. In a post titled “Beware cutesy two-letter TLDs for your domain name”, one of the founders details how its site became unavailable thanks to problems with the .st top level domain name.

You mean something can go wrong when you choose a top level domain name from a tiny island nation of 163,000 people?

As stated by one commenter on the post, there was a hardware failure that caused problems with a number of of the nameservers for .st.

To be fair, a lot of sizable firms have also entrusted their whereabouts to even smaller island nations, but at least .tv is backed by Verisign.

And even ccTLDs from bigger countries can cause worry.

My advice: if you’re going to go with a “cutesy two-letter TLD”, make sure it has solid backing. That includes the registry provider.