Buy your .dog domain today

Dog trainers, groomers, walkers, boarding kennels, breeders, rescues and pet supply brands make up most of what sits on .dog, alongside owners running blogs and community sites about their own dogs.

Three letters do the categorizing, which is why the extension suits a local service business more than a national brand. A visitor reading harborside.dog knows the subject before the page loads.

It also frees up the name in front. Service words that went years ago on .com are often still open here, so a business can use the name it actually trades under rather than a compromise.

No, .dog is open to anyone, with no eligibility rules and no proof of a pet-related business.

The rules are technical only. Names can contain one to 63 characters, hyphens cannot appear in the third and fourth positions and registration periods run from one to 10 years.

Almost everything registered on it is dog-related anyway, because the word is too specific to read as anything else. That is worth weighing before using it for something unrelated.

.dog is operated by Binky Moon, a registry entity within Identity Digital.

It entered the root zone in 2015, delegated at the time to a holding company called Koko Mill, and moved to Binky Moon in 2018 in a single transfer covering close to two hundred extensions. Both steps are on the public record at IANA.

The extension also had competing applicants before launch, including Google's registry arm, and went to a private auction in 2014. None of that history affects how you register, renew or transfer the name today.

There is no .dogs extension, only the singular .dog.

The plural was never delegated to the root zone, so it does not exist to register at any registrar. IANA holds no record for it, and an offer to sell you one is either a mistake or a different product.

Check this before designing around a name. A business whose name ends in dogs has to keep the s in front of the dot, as in cityparkdogs.dog rather than citypark.dogs.

.dog names one animal, .pet covers all of them and .vet points at the profession rather than the animal.

All three are open extensions with no eligibility requirements. That is worth stating for .vet in particular, because the name suggests a credential check and there is none, so a pet brand or a supply shop can register it as easily as a practice can.

The choice comes down to how narrow a signal you want. A dog-only trainer gains precision from .dog, a multi-species practice is better served by .pet, and .vet reads as clinical rather than commercial.

Yes, you can connect a .dog domain to an existing website without rebuilding it.

Connect the domain through your website platform or update its DNS records to point to your current hosting provider. Once connected, set the .dog address as the primary domain so visitors consistently reach the site through one address.

If you are replacing an older domain, keep it active and redirect it to the new one. Grooming, boarding and training businesses collect a lot of links from local directories and booking platforms, and a redirect keeps those arriving.

Update your email addresses, booking pages and local listings after the switch.

Domain privacy can hide eligible personal contact information from public domain registration records, depending on your registrar and applicable requirements.

A great many dog businesses run from a home address, and without privacy protection some registration details may be accessible through public domain lookup services.

Privacy does not change ownership of the domain. You remain the registrant while eligible personal information is hidden or replaced in the public record.

The same .dog name can be quoted at very different rates depending on where you buy it, and the spread across sellers is unusually wide.

Registrars set their own retail margin over the registry wholesale rate, and many discount the first year sharply to win the registration. On comparison sites tracking dozens of registrars, the cheapest and the dearest offers for the same name sit an order of magnitude apart, and renewals often land several times above the opening figure.

Compare the renewal rather than the introductory rate. For a local business that intends to keep the name for years, the recurring figure is the one that matters.

In casual English, calling something a dog means it failed, and that second sense is worth knowing before you commit.

The pejorative reading rarely surfaces when the subject is obviously animals, because context resolves it immediately. It becomes a risk when the business is not dog-related and the word has to stand on its own.

For anything in the pet trade this is close to a non-issue. For a brand outside it, the double meaning is a fair reason to look elsewhere.

Some visitors will type .com out of habit no matter which extension you use, and .dog is no exception.

Autocomplete and muscle memory both favor the endings people see most often. A short specific extension is easy to remember once someone has read it and easy to mistype when they are recalling it days later.

The usual answer is to hold the matching .com where you can and point it at the same site. Where it is unavailable, saying the full address aloud in ads and on the phone does most of the work.