In the digital era, establishing your brand’s web presence is crucial. The first step is creating a website with two main components: the website name and a domain extension.
While most people instinctively search for a business using the .com extension, other options are available. One such extension gaining popularity among Tech sites is .io. In this article, we explore the meaning behind .io and the reason for the sudden rise in its popularity.
What Is a Domain?
A domain refers to the unique address of a website on the internet. It comprises the website name and a domain extension. In most cases, the website name is the name of the brand or business and is the most unique property in the domain.
Domain extensions refer to the combination of characters that follow the period after the website name. By themselves, domain extensions are not exclusive to a single website. The .com extension has over 200 million registered websites, according to Colorlib.
Domain extensions are categorized into sponsored, country code, and generic. Sponsored domains are ultra-specific and can only be used by organizations or businesses in a specific category.
We have .edu for schools and .gov for government bodies, while country code domains specify the location of the business. They include .us for the United States and .uk for the United Kingdom. The last category is the most widely used and available, including top-level domains (TLD) like .com, .tech, .site, .net, and .io.
What Does the .io Domain Extension Mean?
Each domain extension serves a specific use, and knowing how to choose a top-level domain for your site is important. While .com domains suggest that the website is for commercial purposes, the meaning of the .io domain is not so clear.
Originally, the .io domain extension was a country code top-level domain name registered and assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory, an overseas territory of the United Kingdom. However, the domain was never restricted to geographical identification only. Since then, the .io domain extension has acquired more than one meaning.
In the tech industry, the .io domain extension points to a computer science abbreviation, IO, which describes input/output, a common computer science abbreviation. Similarly, gaming projects in the Web3 industry use .io as a matching domain name to refer to web games with multiplayer components and minimalist graphics.
Why Do Tech Sites Use the .io Domain Extension?
Tech companies are abandoning conventional .com domain extensions for cheaper, more specific alternatives, but that’s not the only reason.
Affiliation With the Tech Industry
Tech companies prefer the .io domain extension because of its secondary meaning. In computer science, the characters of the extension IO is a common abbreviation for input/output, the process through which computers and other information systems work.
Understandably, people in the tech industry may quickly associate a website with the .io do
