.associates Domain
For Firms That Work in Partnership
Register your .associates domain from just £34.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .associates domain?
The .associates domain speaks to professional partnerships, consultancy groups, and advisory firms where collaboration is the business model. Law firms, accounting partnerships, and management consultancies that trade under a "& Associates" banner get a domain that reinforces their structure. It signals a team of experts, not a solo operation.
Who should register .associates?
Law firm partnerships, accounting practices, management consultancies, and multi-partner advisory firms.
Why choose .associates?
- Reinforces partnership structure
- Professional and established tone
- Works for legal, financial, and advisory
- Signals a team of experts
Who runs .associates, and since when
Registry data from the .associates delegation record held by IANA, which maintains the internet's root zone. Eligibility comes from the registry's own policy, and the prices are ours.
- Extension type
- Generic (gTLD)
- Registry operator
- Binky Moon, LLC
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2014
- Delegated 3 April 2014
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no professional or corporate check
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £34.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Why .associates suits partnership firm names
Most extensions sit after your name. This one finishes it. A firm trading as Hartley & Associates has usually found that hartleyassociates.co.uk went years ago, and hartley-associates.co.uk reads like a compromise. Move the word into the extension and you get hartley.associates, which says the same thing in fewer characters and without a hyphen.
That is the whole case for it, and the case against is in the same sentence. Ten letters after the dot is one of the longest endings you can buy, so the saving in the name is spent on the ending. Read hartley.associates down a phone line to somebody writing on a pad and you will spell it at least once. Print it on a van and it is a long line of small type.
One buying quirk worth knowing about Identity Digital strings like this one: a trademark holder can place a name on the Domains Protected Marks List, which blocks it across the registry's whole portfolio. A name can therefore be unavailable in .associates without anybody having registered it, and no amount of searching will explain why.
Is .associates the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.associates works well if
- Your firm already trades as "Something and Associates" and the matching .co.uk went to somebody else years ago.
- You want a short, hyphen-free address for a partnership, and the surname on its own is available in front of the dot.
- You are buying a defensive registration around an existing brand and want the obvious partnership variant off the market.
Look elsewhere if
- Most of your enquiries come from UK searches. A .co.uk carries a UK signal that a generic extension like this one does not.
- You give your address out over the phone. Ten letters after the dot gets spelled out, every time, and it costs three times a .co.uk.
- Your clients are not confident online. An unfamiliar ending on a solicitor or accountant website invites a second look at whether it is really you.
For a UK practice taking local enquiries, the .co.uk should be the address on the letterhead and this the memorable one. See .co.uk pricing.
.associates vs .co.uk: which should you register?
A .co.uk is cheaper, shorter to say, and Google reads it as a UK site. Those three things decide it for almost every British partnership taking work from British clients. The .associates does none of them.
What it does do is give you a name you cannot have on .co.uk any more. If hartley.associates is free and hartleyassociates.co.uk is not, the sensible order is to register the .co.uk you can get, point it at the site, and hold the .associates alongside it for cards, email signatures and the times a short address matters. Buying only the .associates trades a real search advantage for a naming one.
.associates domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .associates domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNo. The registry agreement for .associates is a standard one with no community or eligibility specification attached, so anyone anywhere can register a name in it without proving anything about their business structure. That cuts both ways: it means there is no paperwork to clear, and it also means the extension by itself proves nothing to a visitor about the firm behind it. The trust signals still have to come from the site, the regulator listing and the company details.
It is neutral, which is worse than it sounds if your customers are British. Google said in July 2015 on its Search Central blog that its systems treat new generic extensions the same as .com and .org, and that keywords in an extension give no advantage or disadvantage. So the word "associates" in your address earns you nothing. Meanwhile a .co.uk does carry a geographic signal for UK results, so choosing this instead of a .co.uk gives something up rather than gaining anything.
Trademark blocking is the usual explanation. Identity Digital, which runs this extension, sells a Domains Protected Marks List service that lets a trademark owner block a matching name across its whole portfolio of extensions at once. A blocked name is not registered to anyone and hosts no website, but it cannot be bought either. Reserved names and premium pricing account for most of the rest. Ask us and we will tell you which of the three you have hit.
Included with Your .associates Domain
DNS Management
Full DNS zone editor to manage A, CNAME, MX, TXT, and all record types.
Email Forwarding
Set up professional email addresses and forward to any inbox.
Auto-Renewal
Never lose your domain with automatic renewal protection.
Free 10GB Mailbox
One 10GB mailbox (POP3/IMAP) included with every domain, on any TLD.
Other Business Domains Extensions
Register your .associates domain today
Secure your .associates domain from just £34.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
