.fail Domain
Learn from What Went Wrong
Register your .fail domain from just £34.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .fail domain?
The .fail domain has found its niche in failure case studies, post-mortem analysis sites, and comedy platforms dedicated to amusing mistakes. Startup communities use it for lessons-learned blogs. Quality assurance teams use it for bug tracking portals. It's self-deprecating, memorable, and surprisingly useful.
Who should register .fail?
Startup post-mortem blogs, comedy content platforms, QA bug trackers, and lessons-learned knowledge bases.
Why choose .fail?
- Memorable and self-deprecating
- Perfect for lessons-learned content
- Works for comedy and serious analysis
- Low competition for names
Who runs .fail, and since when
Registry data from the .fail 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 17 April 2014
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, first come first served, with no checks
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £34.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Where .fail works, and where it embarrasses you
Say your email address out loud. If it ends in .fail, the joke lands once and then you live with it, which is why the extension has settled into a narrower job than its launch pitch suggested. It works well on things engineers and founders read: post-mortem write-ups, an incident archive, a QA dashboard, a talk about a project that went sideways. It works badly on anything a customer has to dictate, type from memory or trust with a card number.
It is also one of the more expensive jokes on the shelf. A .fail costs more than three times a .co.uk each year, which is a real decision when the alternative is a subdomain of something you already own. postmortems.yourcompany.co.uk costs nothing extra and keeps your brand in front of the reader.
Binky Moon runs it under a plain base agreement, so registration is open to anyone with no checks of any kind, and single-word names are still available here in a way they stopped being in .com two decades ago. If the exact name is the whole idea, that availability is the argument. If the extension is decoration, spend the money somewhere it does more.
Is .fail the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.fail works well if
- You are naming something internal or developer-facing: an incident archive, a post-mortem library, a status page for a deliberately unreliable test service.
- The joke is the product. A comedy project, an awards site for bad design, a newsletter about things that did not work out.
- The exact phrase you want is available here and gone everywhere else, and the phrase matters more to you than the extension does.
Look elsewhere if
- It goes on a business card or an invoice. A supplier reading yourfirm.fail aloud will assume they have misheard you and ask again.
- A subdomain of a domain you already own would carry the same idea for nothing, and this costs more than three times a .co.uk every year.
- You want the address to outlive the joke. Something funny in year one is a support burden by year five, and you cannot rename a domain, only buy another.
Only need somewhere to publish post-mortems? A subdomain of your existing .co.uk costs nothing and carries your brand. See .co.uk pricing.
.fail vs .wtf: which should you register?
Both landed in the same 2014 wave, from the same registry family, at roughly the same price, and both get bought for tone rather than meaning. The difference is how far the tone travels. .fail can read as self-aware in a professional setting, and a post-mortem site on .fail is a recognised genre. .wtf cannot be put in front of a client without a conversation first.
Want the joke to commit? .wtf goes further. Want something you can still link to from a corporate blog in three years without a wince? .fail is the safer of the two, which is a strange sentence to write about either of them.
.fail domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .fail domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyAnyone. Binky Moon operates .fail under a plain ICANN base agreement with no community restriction, so there is no eligibility test, no documentation and no sector check. Registration is first come, first served. The Identity Digital acceptable use policy still applies across the portfolio: no malware, no phishing, no spam and no harassment of individuals or groups. Past that, the registry takes no interest in what you build.
For your main address, yes. The extension reads as a verdict on whatever comes before it, so yourcompany.fail is a name you end up explaining every time you say it, and it gives a customer a reason to double-check they are on the right site. Keep it for a project, a subsite or a campaign, and keep the business itself on something people will type correctly the first time without thinking about it.
More than three times as much, every year. The gap matters more than the first bill, because a domain is a recurring cost for as long as the project runs. Before committing, ask whether a subdomain of a domain you already hold would carry the same idea. postmortem.yourfirm.co.uk costs nothing extra, keeps your brand in front of the reader, and never comes up for renewal on its own.
Included with Your .fail 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 Community Domains Extensions
Register your .fail domain today
Secure your .fail domain from just £34.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
