How to Choose a Domain for Business Email When the .com Is Taken

The .com you wanted is taken, parked, and for sale at a price that would buy a used car. You still need an email address this week. The good news is that an email domain has different requirements from a website domain: it needs to be short to type, clear to say over the phone, and respectable in a recipient's inbox. Those rules are easier to satisfy than "the perfect .com", and this guide walks through them.

Quick answer

For a business that trades mainly in one country, use that country's ending: .co.uk, .ca, .com.au, .de, .co.za, .ng, .in and so on. For a business that trades everywhere, .co or a short, respectable new ending, or your name with one added word on .com. Avoid hyphens, numbers, and the cheapest endings. Check that you may register the ending you choose, and buy the .com later if it ever becomes available at a sane price.

What an email domain has to do

• Be typed correctly by strangers. Every letter that can be misheard on the phone, every hyphen, every "is that one word or two?" costs you email.
• Look like a business in a recipient's inbox. The address is read before the message; a strange ending is read as a warning.
• Be the same for years. Changing an email domain means reprinting, re-announcing and losing mail; the address change guide shows how much work that is.
• Belong to you in a way nobody can dispute: no trademark problems, no residence rule you do not meet.

Option 1: your country's ending

For most small businesses this is the right answer. A customer in Nairobi expects a Kenyan business at .co.ke; a customer in Manchester reads .co.uk as local and trustworthy. Country endings are usually cheap, usually available, and mean something to the people you serve. Some have residence rules: .ca requires a Canadian presence, .com.au requires an Australian business number, .eu requires residence or establishment in the EU or EEA, .us requires a US connection. Most African, Asian and European country endings have no such rule, but check the registry page before you fall in love with a name.

Option 2: a different generic ending

.co is the most widely accepted alternative to .com and reads as "company" to most people; its only cost is a fraction of typed mail going to the .com owner when people autocorrect. .io, .dev and .app are normal for software businesses and odd for a bakery. .shop and .store work for online retail. Avoid the endings sold for under a dollar: they are where spammers register in bulk, some filters treat them with suspicion before reading a word, and a recipient who has never seen the ending reads it as a scam.

Option 3: add a word on .com

yourbusinesshq.com, getyourbusiness.com, yourbusinessstudio.com, yourbusinessco.com, or the city: yourbusinessleeds.com. Pick a word that is natural to say and that describes you; "hq" and "studio" and "group" age well, "online" and "web" do not. Keep the whole thing under about fifteen characters before the dot if you can; you will say it on the phone a thousand times.

What to avoid

• Hyphens. your-business.com is dictated as "your hyphen business" and typed as yourbusiness.com half the time, which sends your mail to someone else.
• Numbers and letter substitutions: 4u, 2go, kwik. Fine for a logo, bad for an address.
• Anything that is someone else's trademark, including a famous name with a word added. A registrar will sell it to you; a lawyer will take it back.
• A name you cannot get the social handles for. You do not need them to match perfectly, but a wildly different handle confuses customers.
• A very long name on a short ending to "make it fit". cheapestplumbersinnorthlondon.co.uk is not an improvement on a slightly different name.

About the taken .com

Look up who holds it. If it is a real business, leave it alone and choose a different name or ending. If it is parked with a "make an offer" page, the price is usually hundreds to thousands; decide what the name is worth to you and do not negotiate against yourself by email. If it is registered but unused with an expiry date, a backorder service at your registrar will try to catch it if it lapses, cheaply. Meanwhile, trade on the domain you can get; an email address customers already use is worth more than a .com you might own one day. If you buy the .com later, the free plan's three domains let you add it beside the first and move over gradually.

Common questions

Can my email domain be different from my website domain?

Yes, and it is common: the website on a long descriptive domain, email on a short one. Customers rarely notice as long as the brand name is the same in both. Keep them the same if you can, but do not let the website hold the email hostage.

Is a new ending worse for deliverability?

A respectable one, .co, .io, .app, .shop, a country ending, is not. deliverability (whether your email lands in the inbox instead of spam) comes from authentication and sending behaviour; the setup guide covers both. The cheapest endings are the exception.

What if I have no domain at all yet?

Then this is the one decision to get right before anything else; the no-domain guide explains why there is no good substitute, and registration takes ten minutes once you have chosen.