A new TLD for Astiga - have your say!

gravelldgravelld Administrator
edited June 2023 in General

Ever since I've been operating the Astiga service, we've had intermittent problems with the asti.ga domain. Users in different parts of the world will sometimes lose connection to the Astiga service, because the name cannot be resolved.

The problem is rooted with the .ga TLD. This is known as a ccTLD - it's the country TLD for Ghana. Other TLDs are the more familiar .com, .net and so on.

In the case of .ga, Ghana are responsible for the overall oversight, and they hand off actual operation to a company called Freenom. Unfortunately, Freenom appear to be to blame for the continual outages; their servers become unreachable at times.

It's time to fix this, and the only way to do this (because petitioning the Ghanaian government to switch from Freenom does not sound like what I want to be doing) is to switch TLD.

Below I have listed some options; I wanted to know what "sounds" better to users of Astiga.

No doubt I've missed a good TLD, so let me know if so, but...

  • I don't want a cheap TLD - there's possibility for abuse which might harm the search ranking of Astiga by association (see https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/)
  • I don't want a TLD with a bad Spamhaus score - on this note, I have decided against .live
  • astiga.com is taken, but I'm open to a .com if a decent domain name can be thought up.

[Poll closed]

What should the new domain name for Astiga be? There were 20 votes.

astiga.audio:       40.00%
astiga.cloud:       15.00%
astiga.fm:          35.00%
astiga.io:          10.00%
astiga.rocks:       0.00%


Post edited by gravelld on

Comments

  • I don't associate FM (radio) with what astiga is all about for me which is playback of my own high quality audio files...

    Also give it a few years and you need to switch to .DAB 😉

  • gravelldgravelld Administrator

    I had similar thoughts @Ronald but I guess you could say the same about last.fm .

  • Whole words domains are stupid anyway and .fm carries a nice association with last.fm so I vote for that.

    Anyway, can't you just get another domain that redirects to the same IP as asti.ga and keep that as a backup for when asti.ga experiences downtime? No need to disable asti.ga when you switch to the new domain. Apologies if that's a stupid idea, I don't know much about the underlying technology.

  • Definitely not .fm - which similar to the other person, has no linkage to the service for me. Younger future subscribers may not even know what it means and associate it only with LastFM

    The audio or cloud names are broad enough it seems.

  • gravelldgravelld Administrator

    It's not just last.fm, there are services like transistor.fm (which is even worse for the radio association) which are really just audio companies...

    @MAK777

    Anyway, can't you just get another domain that redirects to the same IP as asti.ga and keep that as a backup for when asti.ga experiences downtime? No need to disable asti.ga when you switch to the new domain. Apologies if that's a stupid idea, I don't know much about the underlying technology.

    The apps are hardcoded to work against asti.ga right now. So we'll retain that for now, but we can't just switch during downtime.

    I intend to do what you're saying and run both, but the new domain would become the canonical one.

  • CambionnCambionn Member
    edited February 2023

    I like both astiga.fm and astiga.audio, but I went with fm because the shorter URL feels more catchy. The .audio is almost as long after the dot as before which is a bit odd feeling (the a and i on a similar location also doesn't help). I feel that despite it's origin the .fm TLD it doesn't necessarily mean "radio" anymore with sites like last.fm, but more "music/audio related". Beside, a streaming service could be seen as your own private radio station playing whatever you want. The .cloud option feels less related as it ignores the whole audio part of the service. So I guess it really depends on how you look at it.

    As mentioned before I rather not see a .com address. While it's the most common and technically not country bound, it feels American and therefore less privacy minded (considering how USA is instantly anti-GDPR and not that great privacy wise). I'm guessing the .eu option isn't there due to Brexit difficulties?

  • gravelldgravelld Administrator
    edited February 2023

    It's not there because I don't want to imply anything regionally. Whilst .com is historically US focused, I think more people these days see it as just generically commercial, rather than American. .com is now designated a "generic top-level domain" which means it doesn't have any regional bias (now).

  • I couldn’t really think of one from outside that list, so my vote’s for .audio. Unlike .fm, audio could become part of a tagline or something, so that we aren’t completely losing the whole “URL is the name” thing. “Astiga, Audio You Control” or something like that.

  • I would get two, one to use as a backup because domains are cheap.

    Am I correct that "astiga" is Basque for "maple tree"? (according to google translate)? If that's true I think there's some potential for other domains there. If it's wildly inaccurate, there's your trivia for today.

  • gravelldgravelld Administrator

    I actually don't remember the origin of the name - if @Koen is listening, maybe he could remind us...

    Sometimes it comes up in reddit searches in some languages.

  • ruffinruffin Member
    edited February 2023

    Ha, astiga.rocks and astiga.audio both seem like they'd attract very different but relevant audiences.

    I think I'd sacrifice the 🤘 quality of .rocks (a positive for many) for the unoffensive (but unspectacular) .audio.

    (Now having voted and able to see the results, it looks like I was right not to pick .rocks. But it'd be a fun secondary domain... 😏)

  • gravelldgravelld Administrator

    Thanks for voting 🙏

  • .audio says what it is for every user with no justification needed or judgement implied.

  • gravelldgravelld Administrator

    We are now the owners of astiga.audio.

    We've been taking some more configuration action to try to minimise any asti.ga downtime. To this end, our next action will be to transparently enable astiga.audio as a failover domain for the app. So, if asti.ga stops working, it can start using astiga.audio instead.

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