Buy your .cyou domain today

.cyou domains are used mostly by creators, communities and short-run projects. Event and meetup pages, fan sites, music and streaming projects, campaign microsites and personal brands are the common cases.

The extension was built with a younger audience in mind, and the naming reflects it. The registry itself promotes names built around single words like art, create and success, which tells you the intended shape: one memorable word in front of the dot.

It is less common for established businesses, and that is a fair reflection of how the extension is used rather than a rule. If you are naming something built to last a decade, read the trust question further down this page first.

Yes, .cyou is open to everyone with no restrictions at all. The registry states plainly that there are no barriers based on country, industry or purpose.

There is no local presence requirement, no documentation to submit and no verification step. You will not be asked what the site is for, and nothing about your business type changes what you can buy.

Registration is first come, first served, so availability is the only real constraint. Because the extension is cheap in year one, plain words go quickly, and it is worth checking two-word combinations as well as your first choice.

.cyou is read as “see you”, the text-message shorthand, which is what the registry intends. It is a farewell turned into an address.

That gives you two ways to use it. Either the whole address reads as a phrase, so a name and the extension together make a sentence, or the extension is simply a short tail on a word you care about and the meaning stays in the name.

The second approach travels better. Not everyone parses the pun, and an address that only works if the reader gets the joke is a fragile thing to print on a poster. Say your shortlist out loud and keep the ones that survive being misheard.

.cyou is not a well-known extension, and it is safer to assume most visitors will not recognize it. In a public discussion about the extension, the most upvoted reply was simply that the writer had never heard of it.

That is not fatal, but it changes what the address has to do. A recognized ending carries some of the meaning for you. An unrecognized one puts all the weight on the name in front of the dot and on the page itself.

The practical consequence is that you cannot rely on people remembering the ending. Print the full address, use it consistently everywhere your audience looks, and expect to say it out loud more than once.

If the matching .com is available and affordable, taking it alongside your .cyou name is a sensible precaution. Buyers raise this point repeatedly in public discussions of the extension.

The reason is typing habit rather than trust. People default to .com when recalling an address, so traffic you have earned can land on someone else’s site. Owning both and pointing the .com at your .cyou site closes that gap.

If the .com is taken or expensive, it is not a blocker. It does mean the .cyou address has to appear everywhere your audience looks, including social profiles and anything printed.

A .cyou domain can use letters, numbers and hyphens, up to sixty-three characters, and hyphens are not allowed in the third and fourth positions together.

On the minimum length the sources do not agree. The registry’s own guidance suggests names can be very short indeed, while third-party registrar data lists a three-character floor, so treat one and two-character names as unlikely to be available rather than impossible.

In practice that argument rarely matters, because short names on any extension are held back as premiums. Search the name you actually want first, then work outwards.

A .cyou renewal can rise, and there is no published ceiling on what the registry may charge in later years. This is the objection experienced domain buyers raise about the extension more than any other.

Registry pricing on newer extensions is set at the registry’s discretion and can change with notice. A name that is cheap to enter today carries no guarantee for five years out, and the first-year discount on .cyou is unusually deep, which makes the possible gap wider than most.

So price the name on its renewal rather than its promotion. If the project needs to exist for years rather than months, registering for several years at once fixes the cost for that period.

For a creator project either .cyou or .xyz can work, and they are close cousins: both are cheap, both are open, both are much newer than .com.

.xyz is far larger and better known, which means more recognition and fewer free words. .cyou is smaller and carries an actual meaning, so a well-chosen name can read as a phrase rather than a random tail.

Both extensions have been used heavily for spam, so neither escapes the trust conversation. If that concerns you, the honest comparison is not between these two but between either of them and a longer name on a mainstream extension.

A .cyou domain does start from a weaker position on trust than a mainstream extension, and you should know that before you buy. This is the most useful thing anyone can tell you about the extension.

The reason is volume rather than anything about your site. Very low first-year pricing attracts bulk registration, .cyou has appeared at or near the top of independent phishing measurements in past years, and some mail administrators respond by filtering the whole extension rather than judging individual domains. There are public examples of exactly that being done.

So configure your mail authentication carefully, test delivery to the providers your customers actually use, and give people a second way to reach you. If your business depends on cold email or on messages reliably reaching corporate inboxes, this is not the extension to build that on.

For a site that takes payments, .cyou is a harder starting point than a mainstream extension. It is possible, and plenty of ordinary sites run on it, but you are choosing to spend some goodwill at the moment people enter card details.

Checkout is where an unfamiliar address costs the most. A buyer who has never seen the extension has no way to tell a real shop from a throwaway one, and the price that made the domain attractive to you also made it attractive to people who are not selling anything.

If you go ahead, compensate visibly: a clear about page, a real postal address, visible contact details, and consistency between the domain and the name on the card statement. If eCommerce is the whole business, a longer name on a familiar extension is the safer trade.