If Person A visits your web site and thinks "wow, that's pretty nifty," and says to person B, "wow, fiddlecats is a great web site," person B is not going to ask if it is .net or .biz or .com. Person B is going to type in fiddlecats.com. And if that doesn't work, you will have lost them.

This advice may not apply identically in all countries. Some countries have a well-established national domain for businesses, such as .co.uk in the United Kingdom. But even outside the US, it is not uncommon to register a company site in the .com domain.

The .biz domain, while tempting because a slightly larger variety of names may still be available, has no real distinguishing features to recommend it over .com and most people will not remember that your site is in .biz rather than .com.

Nonprofit organizations should consider registering in the .org domain, or in both .org and .com to help confused users locate them. Educational institutions can register .edu domains. For more information about top-level domains, see the 'top-level domains entry'. For more information about how to register your domain, see 'how do I set up a web site?'