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A developer shares a cautionary tale about registering a free .online TLD from Namecheap for a small project. Weeks later, the domain was flagged by Google Safe Browsing and placed on serverHold by the registry (Radix) with no notification. This created a catch-22: Google requires domain verification via DNS to remove the blacklist flag, but the registry won't lift the serverHold until Google removes the flag, and DNS doesn't resolve while on serverHold. The post concludes with lessons learned: stick to .com, add domains to Google Search Console immediately, and set up uptime monitoring even for simple landing pages.

Never Buy A .online Domain

That’s the most wildest take on TLD I’ve heard in years, suggesting only .com is a valid standard while hundrets of gTLD, ccTLD and nTLD are officially recognized by ICANN.
No company, especially not US companies, should have power over restricting official standards that would affect milions of humans world wide.

“stick to .com” is not a solution. At most, it’s a temporary workaround. That’s like saying, stick to horse carriages, when the city you live in is so old, they do not deal well with your otherwise perfectly normal car.

I had .rocks, .surf, .space, .digital and .what-not domains with namecheap and never got issues with them
also this:
“Buying a weird TLD. .com is the gold standard. I’m never buying anything else again. Once bitten and all that.”
is just plain wrong, basically saying &quot; i drank water from poisoned well once, so I am not drinking water in general for the rest of my life!&quot;