.com Domain
The World's Most Recognised Domain

Get the .co.uk if your customers are British, because Google reads a UK country-code extension as evidence the site is aimed at Britain and a .com gives it nothing to work with. Get the .com if you sell abroad, or expect to, or if the address has to be read out to people who will type .com whatever you tell them. Most established businesses hold both and redirect one, which costs two renewals a year and settles the argument permanently.

Because the registry contract permits it on a schedule. Verisign may raise its wholesale price by up to seven per cent, but only in the final four years of each six-year period, with the first period having begun on 26 October 2018. Six months' notice is required before any increase takes effect. That is more protection than any 2014-era extension gives you, since those have no cap at all, but it does mean the price drifts upward in predictable bursts rather than staying still.

Yes, and it is the most useful thing in the whole contract. Verisign is obliged to keep offering registration and renewal terms of up to ten years at the price in force when the order is accepted, so paying for a long term fixes the registry's side of the cost for that period. There is a second benefit that has nothing to do with money: a domain paid up for years cannot be lost to a renewal reminder sent to an email address nobody checks any more.

Because .com is a thin registry. Verisign stores only the domain name, its nameservers, its dates and its status codes; the registrant contact details live with whichever registrar the domain sits at. A lookup against the registry therefore tells you where the domain is registered, not who holds it, and a full answer needs a second query against the registrar. Nominet runs .uk the other way round, holding the registrant record itself, which is why a .co.uk lookup looks more complete.

It depends what is left. A short, clean .com is still the strongest general-purpose address on the internet and worth paying for. A .com that needs a hyphen, a filler word or a deliberate misspelling is worth less than a clean .co.uk, because you will spend the next ten years explaining it on the phone and losing traffic to whoever holds the obvious version. Change the word in front of the dot before you accept a compromised .com.

Yes. Your remaining registration period carries over intact and the transfer adds a further year on completion, so you never lose time. Unlock the domain at your current registrar, get the authorisation code, and start the transfer here; expect a few days rather than the near-instant IPS tag change a .uk gets. Note the two ICANN rules: no transfer within sixty days of registration, and a recent registrant change can impose a sixty-day lock of its own.