Some interesting news here has been released stating that “web risk” has increased to a record 6.2% of more than 27 million domain names.
Apparently one of the world’s most heavily trafficked domains, .COM, is now the riskiest domain to visit:
While .COM is the riskiest top-level domain, the riskiest country domain is Vietnam (.VN). Japan’s .JP ranks as the safest country domain for the second year in a row and .TRAVEL as the safest overall domain.
It’s interesting to note that .JP (currently $89.99 at GoDaddy) and .TRAVEL ($89.99 at Moniker) domains are also some of the most expensive domains.
The question that is naturally asked is whether or not cybercriminals are going the cheap-route with other people’s credit cards or do higher prices make them more risky?
The Top 5 Riskiest Country Web Domains
This raises an interesting question: Are we past the point where a dot.com address is needed to stand out beyond others?
Or are more personalized domains going to become more common? John has two of them. One here and another here. Or are such domains good more for personalize branding?
What about for ministry or a church? For instance, your church is Bible Fellowship church in Atlanta.
Most churches would register something such as biblefellowship.com, but what if they went after something like, biblefellowship.at/ga (which is available) or some other variation? Does it work? Or does maintaining the .com brand still work best? What about for security purposes?
Thoughts?
BenJPickett says
One thing that I still find all the time when teaching my co-workers how to access their email from OWA and I give them the site URL they ask “is there a www there?” I tell them no, they call my cell 6 to 8 hours later when we’re all home and tell me that they can’t get to the site. So I ask them what they put into the address bar and they say http://www.mail.domainname.com. I’ve had the same experience from other people when I’ve directed them to a site that doesn’t end in .com, net, or org. They call me up and tell me I got the address wrong and (using bit.ly for example) “I’ve tried http://www.bit.ly.com, .net and .org, none of them work” or is something completely different to what I told them it was.
I think those of us that are tech savvy need to stop for 10 minutes and realize what generations will be using the site, what type of users we’re targeting and who will be included in our audience. Now there may be a day when everyone knows not every site will start with www or end with .com, net, or org, and I hope that day comes real soon, but it is pretty clear to me that day is not here yet. Until then this is what we have to consider when purchasing a domain name and while it may be fun to have those domain names that give a special brand to our product, service or our personal site, will it help us reach our audience? So if that really is a something you want you may find yourself wanting to buy both and forward to your branded URL.
This is how it has to apply to the church too. We need to reach as many people as we can so we put a presence out there but they won’t waste their time searching for us. We need to make our selves and ministry’s easy to find for everyone, from where our gatherings our held to our URL. After that it’s up to the people; this is not an Us vs. Them, it’s an Us loving, inspiring and leading Them.