.co Domain
The Modern Business Domain
Register your .co domain from just £27.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .co domain?
Originally Colombia's country code, .co has been rebranded as a global commercial domain. Short, memorable, and professional, .co has been adopted by major brands and startups alike as a credible alternative to .com.
Who should register .co?
Startups, modern businesses, and brands wanting a short, professional domain.
Why choose .co?
- Short and memorable
- Adopted by major global brands
- Strong .com alternative
- Professional and modern feel
Who runs .co, and since when
Registry data from the .co 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
- Country-code (ccTLD)
- Registry operator
- Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies (MinTIC)
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 1991
- Delegated 24 December 1991
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no Colombian residency or local presence requirement
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £27.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
What a .co domain signals, and what it cannot
Say a .co domain out loud to somebody who does not work in technology, then watch what they type. They type .com. That one fact governs most of what follows, and any page selling you a .co without mentioning it is not being straight with you.
Colombia has held the CO code since 1991, and for most of that time the second level was shut. Colombian organisations registered under com.co, net.co or org.co, and the bare .co was not for sale to anybody. That changed on 20 July 2010, when .CO Internet S.A.S. announced general availability and opened second-level registrations to the whole world. The queue formed the same day, because short names that had been unavailable in .com for years were suddenly on the shelf again.
The extension has since settled into a clear role. It reads as a clipped "company" or "commercial" rather than as Colombia, and Google agrees with that reading: .co sits on Google's published list of country-code extensions treated as generic, alongside .io, .me and .tv. There is a consequence almost nobody spells out. A .co carries no country signal in search at all, and Google has withdrawn the Search Console country targeting setting, so there is no lever left to add one by hand. If your customers search from the UK, a .co gives you nothing a .com does not, and rather less than a .co.uk does.
The registry side has moved twice. Colombia's Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies brought the top-level domain back under direct government management in 2020, and on 4 October 2025 the technical operation moved again, to CentralNic in London. Neither change touches what you may register or what you pay, but .co is now a government-managed extension with a commercial operator behind it rather than a private registry selling its own product.
Our steer: a .co earns its place when the name matters more than the extension. A short product name, a launch you want live this month, a brand where the realistic alternative is something like getname.com. It is a poor choice as the permanent address of a business that takes orders over the phone, because you will spend the next decade spelling it out. If you can stretch to both, buy the .com as well and point one at the other. A .com costs less per year than a .co does, which surprises people.
Is .co the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.co works well if
- You are naming a product or a startup and the matching .com went twenty years ago. A clean two-word .co beats getname.com or name-hq.com.
- Your audience finds you by link, search result and app store listing rather than by hearing your address read out.
- You want a name still available at a sensible length, and you are willing to pick up the .com later if it ever comes free.
- You are building for an international audience, where a UK extension would narrow you and no single country signal would help.
Look elsewhere if
- Your customers ring you and read the address back over the phone. They will say .com, and whoever owns that domain gets the visit and the email.
- You sell to UK consumers who search locally. A .co carries no country signal whatsoever, and a .co.uk costs roughly a third as much.
- Somebody already owns the matching .com and uses it. You will hand them stray traffic and misaddressed email for as long as you hold the name.
- Price matters. A .co costs almost three times a .co.uk and nearly double a .com, and that gap repeats every year.
Selling mainly to UK customers? A .co.uk gives you the country signal a .co cannot, at a fraction of the annual cost. See .co.uk pricing.
.co vs .com: which should you register?
Nobody buys a .co without having considered the .com first, so the honest comparison is not about quality. It is about what is still available, and what happens when your address leaves the screen.
Where .com wins: it is the default in every head and every autocomplete, it is cheaper here than the .co is, and it never has to be explained. Where .co wins: availability, brevity, and a look that suits a product name rather than a corporate one. What it does not win is search visibility in any market, because Google reads it as generic and gives it no geographic weight in either direction.
The version of this decision that works is to treat the .com as insurance rather than as the alternative. Register both, run the one you prefer, redirect the other, and the question stops mattering.
| .co | .com | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Country-code, read as generic by Google | Generic, no country ties |
| Open to the world since | 2010 | 1985 |
| Read aloud | Frequently heard as .com | The default assumption |
| Short names available | More, in most categories | Very few without hyphens |
| Who runs it | Colombia's MinTIC, operated by CentralNic | Verisign, under contract to ICANN |
| Annual cost | Nearly double | The cheaper of the two |
.co domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .co domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyIt is a reasonable one for a product or a brand, and a weak one for a local service business. The case for it is availability: short, clean names still exist in .co that vanished from .com in the 1990s. The case against is that people hear .com and type .com, so a business whose address gets spoken aloud pays for the substitution over and over. If the name is worth having, budget for both.
No. There is no domicile, residency or local presence requirement for a second-level .co, and nothing to evidence at the point of order. Registration is first come, first served through accredited registrars anywhere in the world. The restricted Colombian third levels are separate: names under gov.co and edu.co have their own eligibility rules and go through a local registrar, but they are not what you are buying here.
It is neutral rather than bad, and neutral is the problem if your market is local. Google publishes a list of country-code extensions it treats as generic and .co is on it, so the extension carries no geographic weight in either direction. Google has also retired the Search Console setting that let owners nominate a target country, which leaves hreflang markup and the extension doing that job.
Some of them will, so plan for it rather than hope. The risk is highest on anything spoken: a phone call, a radio advert, a van, a conference stand. It is lowest where the address is clicked rather than retyped. The fix is to own the matching .com and redirect it, which also stops a competitor or a domain parker collecting the traffic and any email sent to the wrong address.
One is a second-level registration, the other a third-level one under Colombia's original commercial namespace. Before 2010 the bare .co was closed and com.co was where Colombian businesses registered, so com.co carries a stronger Colombian association and a longer address. The global market that grew after 2010 is almost entirely second-level .co, which is what people mean when they say a .co domain today.
The registry charges more, and demand from the startup market has kept the price there. Nothing technical justifies the gap, because DNS resolution, DNSSEC and the record types available are identical across every extension. What you pay for is the shorter names still free and the look of the address. Check the price on this page against the .com and the .co.uk before you commit, and remember the bill recurs annually.
Included with Your .co 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 Geographic Domains Extensions
Register your .co domain today
Secure your .co domain from just £27.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
