Ready for .sucks or .sexy? New domain names available next week

Ever thought it would be cool to have something other than “.com” at the end of your website URL? If you find .ca and .net just a tad blasé too, you’re in luck: On Feb. 4, the largest number of generic top-level domain names (gTLDs, or the suffix to any URL) will come into existence, opening up a whole new world of possible kooky domain names.

About 1,000 new gTLDs will start to go live Feb. 4, Quartz reports, and anyone can buy a domain name with the gTLD of his or her choosing. In 2012, companies applied for gTLDs they wished to own, and those that were approved will be going live next month. Companies like Google and Amazon applied for lots of them, 101 and 76 respectively, but not as much as a firm set up specifically to buy domain names, called Donuts, who applied for 307 altogether. In total, 1,930 applications were received by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and 751 of the names are contested, meaning more than one company applied for ownership. All of the non-trademarked gTLDs will go up for auction.

So what kind of names will you be able to buy? Now, you can have your website URL end in .pizza, .yoga, .wtf or .sucks, just to name a few. You can read the full list of gTLDs that have been applied for here. This new flood of gTLDs also includes the first in non-Latin alphabets. For the first time, you can buy gTLDs that use Arabic, Russian or Chinese characters.

[ Related: Regina law firm aims to be merchant of .love ]

If you do opt to buy a domain with a new gTLD, it may not come cheap, depending on what you’re looking for. Quartz reports that pre-registration for domains on GoDaddy are already open, and show that while .guru is a relative bargain at $39.99 per year, .luxury will start at $799.99 per year.

And if you’re a major company, chances are the release of all these gTLDs will quickly turn into an expensive headache. The problem of “domain squatters,” or people who buy domain names simply so someone else has to pay them for it later, will be prevalent if companies aren’t fast. And as much as a company wouldn’t want a negative domain name, either, they’ll have to buy them simply to keep them out of the hands of those who could use them against the company. Think how unfortunate it would be if someone started running an xbox.sucks site.

The gTLDs will be made available throughout the year, starting with شبكة (Arabic for ‘web/network’), онлайн (Russian for ‘online’), сайт (Russian for ‘site’) and 游戏 (Chinese for ‘game[s]’) on Feb. 4.

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