Buy your .rest domain today

Both, and the registry sells it as the restaurant one. Sellers market .rest as a short form of restaurant that reads the same way across a lot of languages, and the live zone does contain working restaurants, including a Michelin-starred kitchen in Spain.

The developer reading is real but much smaller. REST is the standard term for a style of web API, and there are live sites on the extension serving API documentation, an open-data transport API and a developer resource on API standards. Neither audience is large, so the extension is unlikely to be misread by the people you are aiming at.

Anyone can register a .rest domain, with no restaurant license needed and no developer credential either. The registry sets no eligibility condition, and the extension is sold worldwide through ordinary registrars.

One practical note on names: .rest sells labels shorter than most food extensions allow, with live sites running on four-character names. So if a very short address is the point, check here before you rule it out.

Yes, and this turns out to be the most common way a restaurant ends up on .rest. A large European wholesale food group runs a hospitality website product that issues its restaurant customers addresses beneath its own .rest domain, so a venue gets a site and an address without registering anything itself.

That is worth knowing for two reasons. It means you may already have access to a .rest address through a supplier, and it means the extension is more used than a count of registered names would suggest. If you want the address to be yours rather than a tenant of somebody else, register it directly.

Yes, and .rest has more Spanish-language use than English. The registry itself is a Mexican company, and the live zone includes Spanish-language restaurant sites with menus and carta pages, which makes the extension a comfortable fit for a Spanish-speaking market.

The word carries across other languages too, which is part of the pitch. If you serve a bilingual audience, a .rest address avoids the problem of choosing between a Spanish word and an English one.

The difference is length, operator and what the word admits. .restaurant spells the whole thing and leaves no doubt, while .rest is shorter, easier to type and keeps the abbreviation ambiguous enough to cover a bar, a cafe or a group.

They are run by entirely different registries, so nothing carries over between them. .menu is the third option and it behaves differently again, refusing very short labels altogether, and .bar shares a registry platform with .rest if drinks rather than food are the center of the business. For most venues the deciding factor is simply which name is free, so check the shortlist across all four before you settle. A group with several sites can also hold one and point the rest at it, which keeps the branding consistent without paying for four addresses.

A .rest domain reads perfectly for an API, and a handful of real developer sites already do it. Documentation portals, an open-data transport API and a resource on API design standards all run on the extension, so the association is established enough not to look like a joke.

Before you plan around a particular name, check it resolves to something. Several of the most obvious vendor-style names on this extension were registered, dropped and are now sitting at auction, so an address that looks taken may simply be for sale.

A .rest domain sits in a zone of roughly ninety thousand names, which makes it mid-sized rather than niche. The shape of the holdings is the thing to know: about three quarters of it sits at three discount registrars, which is the signature of cheap first-year buying rather than of businesses settling in.

So expect a mix. There are genuine restaurants and genuine developer sites, and there is also a large speculative layer, which means a name you want may be held by someone with no plans for it. Brand-based names remain the reliable route.

A .rest address reads as restaurant to most people who see it in context, on a menu, a receipt or a shopfront window. Read cold and out of context it is less obvious, because rest is also an ordinary English word with nothing to do with food.

The fix is in the name rather than the extension. Putting the venue name in front of it makes the whole address read correctly, and a booking address printed alongside a logo and a phone number is never ambiguous.