Hayley,
This is a really interesting question! And you've baited me in to my first Access Points community response. I love bleeding-edge IT topics, so here are a handful of thoughts from a new ATLIS vendor and friend, Black Glove.
I really like how top level domains (TLDs) like .education and .academy offer a unique way of showcasing a school's identity. Shorter and memorable domains are finally available and affordable, without spending fortunes on parked or squatted com/org/net/edu. I've even noticed some organizations use newer TLD domains as mini sites to talk about specific sub-missions and values - kolide.com has the wonderful honest.security (a lovely read for the ATLIS audience, separate from the topic at hand). Even in the midst of writing this response, it occurred to me that I should immediately buy the blackglove.services domain for Black Glove to pair with blackglove.app - just in case.
Despite all of the above, I'd offer a few words of caution around production use of the newer TLDs. My wife and I operated a domain ending in .rentals for a small real estate business. We found that in the course of normal operations, using a .rentals email account with some business banking products and web forms required additional support or in some cases didn't function at all. For example, when trying to use Zelle for some of our contractors, we ended up running in to limitations that only allowed com/net/org/edu domains. Going forward with that experience, I wouldn't choose a non-standard TLDs if supporting email services, identity services, or productivity services for an organization's student/teacher/staff operations. Especially when coupled with the general risk and pain of managing a broader internal DNS changeover. For external-only marketing sites, redirects, mini-sites, and business brand extensions I think newer TLDs are a relatively inexpensive ways to protect your brand and name while giving some optionality for future novel uses.
One last related thought even further out on the bleeding edge in the vanity/TLD/DNS space is understanding where cryptocurrency plays in to future of payment/donation for businesses and schools. Like IP addresses, crypto wallet addresses aren't visibly meaningful without a name service to translate back to the numeric address. To fix this, services such as https://ens.domains were created to let users or businesses register a .eth decentralized Ethereum Name Service (ENS) name to point to crypto wallet addresses and other resources. So if Black Glove decided to accept cryptocurrency as payment, we could point customers to blackglove.eth as the payment address which is a registered alias to our cryptocurrency wallet. Some web browsers such as Brave and Opera offer support for ENS today. The cost of registering an .eth domain varies based on Ethereum's price (ouch, too soon) and gas price, but it is typically under $200 for a multi year registration. Unlike traditional DNS, this name services lives on a decentralized blockchain network so gas fees must be paid (in Ethereum) any time you want to make changes to your ENS record.
I'm really interested to hear more domain folklore and future curiosity from the rest of the community!
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David Starr
CEO and Co-founder, Black Glove
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-11-2022 10:43 AM
From: Hayley Gunther
Subject: domain names
Hi All - We are currently using ancss.org for our secondary school website, but I see that with the recent expansion in options for domains we could have ANC.education and ANC.academy.
Are any other independent schools thinking of changing their domains? Or at least buying them to protect them?
Thanks,
Hayley Gunther
Academy of the New Church
Bryn Athyn PA
#General
#SustainingInnovationandLookingAhead
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Hayley Gunther
Educational Technologist
Academy of the New Church Secondary Schools
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