Buy your .bar domain today

A .bar domain fits any venue whose business is a counter and a room. Cocktail bars, breweries, taprooms, wine bars, sports bars, juice bars and hotel lounges all read correctly on it.

The appeal is that the category sits in the address itself. Merchant House of Bow Lane in the City of London trades on merchanthouse.bar, which tells you what the place is before the page has loaded.

A second group has adopted it for the interface meaning instead. Progress Bar is a coworking space in Rotterdam on progress.bar, and Space.bar is an eCommerce agency in Mexico, both trading on the pun rather than on drinks.

No, .bar is open and unrestricted, and any person or company can register one. The registry policy says so directly, and there is no local presence requirement and no proof of a hospitality business.

That has one practical consequence worth planning for. Because nothing is checked, the good short labels went early, so the name you want may already be held even though the extension is small.

It also means the ending carries no authority of its own. A venue still has to look like a venue on the page, with an address, opening hours and a menu that is actually current.

.bar is marketed and used as a drinks and hospitality ending, not a legal one. The registry pairs it with .rest and its published examples are venues, brands and interface puns, with nothing aimed at the legal profession anywhere in its material.

The confusion that actually happens runs the other way. Registrants keep reaching for the tech and interface reading, as with progress.bar and space.bar, so a visitor is more likely to expect a product than a law practice.

For a venue this is good news. Nothing in the ecosystem primes a legal reading, so cocktailroom.bar or thecorner.bar arrives exactly as intended.

A law firm can register a .bar domain, because the extension is open, but it will not signal what a legal ending signals. .bar verifies nothing at all about a registrant.

.law and .abogado work on the opposite principle. Both limit registration to a qualified lawyer whose license is checked against an approved regulator before the name is issued and re-checked at renewal, which is the entire reason those endings carry weight.

There is also a professional risk to weigh in the United States. Many state bars restrict implying official bar-association status, and an unverified .bar address is exactly the kind of thing that could read that way, so a firm is usually better served by a verified ending.

.bar is also the name of a coastal municipality in Montenegro, and the launch reserved a phase for its residents. Applicants had to show a Montenegrin identity card and proof of residency in Bar, be over eighteen and match the surname on the document.

The registry also set aside the obvious civic names. Addresses covering the municipality and the country were held back rather than sold, which is standard practice when an extension doubles as a place name.

All of that closed years ago and none of it applies now. The extension is open worldwide, and the episode survives only as the reason a few names are unavailable.

.bar and .pub both fit a drinks venue, and the split is tone plus cost. .bar reads modern and international, while .pub reads traditional and carries a second publishing meaning that .bar does not have.

Price is the sharper difference. .bar sits well above the cheap tier at renewal while .pub renews flat and considerably lower, so over five years the choice is not close on budget alone.

The tie-breaker is usually the room itself. A cocktail bar or a taproom reads better on .bar, a traditional house or an inn reads better on .pub, and either beats a hyphenated .com nobody can dictate over the phone.

Yes, a .bar domain can take over from your current address or sit alongside it. Pointing it at an existing site is a DNS change, so nothing about the site itself has to be rebuilt.

Most venues start by forwarding. The new name redirects to the site they already have, which lets them print it on coasters and chalkboards and hear how it lands before committing.

Making it primary is what builds recognition. Once the name is the one on your signage and your bookings confirmation, keeping the old domain pointed at it catches anyone using the address they already knew.

A .bar address is often easier to remember than the .com alternative, because it can be shorter and it says what the place is. thecorner.bar takes fewer characters than thecornerbarnyc.com and survives being shouted across a room.

The honest caveat is habit. Some people type .com by reflex whatever you print, which is why venues that can afford both usually register the .com and point it at the .bar site.

In practice most of your traffic never types anything. It arrives from a map listing, a booking platform, an Instagram bio or a search, and in all of those the address is a link rather than something anyone spells.

A .bar domain is cheap in year one and expensive every year after, and the gap is larger than on most extensions. The opening price is a registrar promotion while the renewal reflects what the registry actually charges.

This is the single most important thing to check before you buy. Look at the renewal rate rather than the first-year offer, because that is the figure you live with for as long as you keep the address.

For a venue that plans to trade under the name for years, it is worth pricing a multi-year registration up front and keeping auto-renew on. Losing an address that is printed on your menus and saved in your regulars phones costs far more than the renewal ever will.