Buy your .family domain today

Two quite different groups use .family: households on one side, and family-run businesses on the other.

On the household side it goes to reunion pages, shared photo archives, genealogy projects and memorial pages. On the business side it goes to family dentists, family law firms, childcare and family-run restaurants and hotels.

No. Registration is first come, first served with no relationship test and no documentation, and nothing requires registrants to be related to each other or to the name they register. The registry's published rules do name harassment and cyber-bullying as abuse, which is worth knowing for a shared site.

Common surnames went early, so a second form is usually needed, and some read much better than others.

The strongest fallback is the definite article plus the plural surname, which is how families refer to themselves out loud anyway. Adding the word family before the dot produces a stutter, and a first name plus surname works where several branches share the name.

Yes, though it takes two separate steps and people usually think of only one. Domain privacy keeps your personal details out of public registration records such as WHOIS, but it cannot hide the domain name itself, so a surname in the address is public by definition.

The second step is what actually protects a family. Put photos and anything naming children behind a password, keep those pages out of search indexes, and think twice about publishing birth dates or schools for living relatives.

Yes, and for some businesses it does more work than a generic extension would. Being family run is a genuine selling point in dentistry, law, hospitality and trades, where customers are choosing between an independent practice and a chain.

The caution is that it commits you. If you expect to sell the business or bring in outside partners, the address will start describing something you used to be.

No. The .kids extension is run by a non-profit with published principles built on children's rights, a reporting and takedown process and an appeals mechanism, while this extension is an ordinary open extension with a general abuse policy and no child-specific obligations.

So the extension confers no safety assurance. Whatever protection a family site has comes from how you configure it, not from the letters after the dot.

A tier of names sits outside the standard terms, and short surnames are heavily represented in it. The registry reserves and reprices names at its discretion and can revise that list over time.

Check what happens at renewal before you commit. Some names in the tier carry the different terms only in the first year and others carry them every year, which is the part people miss.

It can. Registrars often price the first year below the regular renewal, and short surnames in particular can carry premium pricing.

Check the renewal cost before registering, and consider a multi-year registration so a shared family site does not lapse because one person missed a notice.

The domain expires and the site goes with it, which is the most common way a family project is lost. Renewal notices go to the registrant's email address, so if that person moves on or stops reading it, nobody else finds out until the site is gone.

Register for several years at once, use a contact address a real person still reads, and write down somewhere other relatives can find who holds the domain.