BASICS – What is a TLD?

Every industry has its lingo and acronyms and the Internet industry has more than its fair share.

One acronym you will come across fairly often is TLD. TLD stands for Top Level Domain. Basically, the TLD is the last part of a domain name. The .com, .net, or .ca part of a domain name.

There are several different types of TLDs but the most websites will use either a generic TLD (gTLD) or a country code TLD (ccTLD). Generic TLDs examples are: .com, .net, .org, .info and .accountants. The most common gTLDs are .com, .net and .org. Over the past few years, new gTLDs have been created. New gTLDs are becoming more popular due to the difficulty in getting the .com version. Newish gTLDS include .tax, .ninja, .rocks and .family.

Country code TLDs examples are: .ca (Canada), .in (India), .md (Moldova) and .us (United States) . Sometimes ccTLDs have restrictions and may be reserved for companies located in that specific country.  Some countries have opened their ccTLDs to commercial businesses outside of their country. Several ccTLDs are used to make clever domain names like bit.ly.

Generally, ccTLDs are more expensive than .com, .net and .org TLDs.