Is Ltd a good domain?

How the .LTD “corporate identifier” domain is resonating with Chinese companies.

I was reading Chinese domain news the other day and the top level domain .ltd was mentioned, so I did a little bit of study on this extension.

On the surface, the extension makes sense because many companies in China and other countries have “Co., Ltd” or simply “Ltd” in their names. Also, .ltd domains are very affordable to own – costing less than $10 to register one.

To find such domains adopted by end users, you can use the search term site:ext where ext is the name of a domain extension. Entering site:ltd into Baidu search returned 334,000 results including many Chinese companies such as TYmetro.ltd (road infrastructure), Max.ltd (domain registrar), and IIM.ltd (robotics).

However, data provided by Namestat.org does not look very rosy. According to the site, the .ltd extension was launched in 2016 and most buyers come from China. Registrations peaked at 655,000 in 2018 and have been declining since then. Currently, the number is about 104,000. See the chart below taken from the site.

Reported sales of .ltd domains have been few and far between. Namebio lists only 8 transactions, as shown below.

Domain Price Year Co.ltd $115,000 2016 Home.ltd $2,300 2017 1000miglia.ltd $500 2018 Millemiglia.ltd $500 2018 Scarf.ltd $450 2017 Law.ltd $275 2017 HDbank.ltd $199 2018 Anpaper.ltd $199 2018

In short, do your research if you are interested in investing in this domain extension.

Maximum registration period 10 years This is the maximum number of years that you can manually add to your domain registration. Transfer purchase requirement One year About domain transfers to Google Domains Transfer authorization required No This indicates if the current registrant requires authorization to complete a transfer. If so, the current registrant receives a verification email. Auto-renew timing versus Expiration date Zero days If you have auto-renew enabled, this is the number of days before or after your registration expires that Google Domains processes an auto-renew payment. Auto-renew grace period 15 days When you enable auto-renew, this is the number of days after your registration expires that you have to update your payment method until your service is disrupted. Expiration disruption period Zero days If you don't have auto-renew enabled and your registration expires, you have a certain number of days before your service is disrupted. Renewal grace period 30 days

When your domain expires, you have a certain number of days to renew the domain for another year.

For more details about price, go to the price section above. Restoration grace period 30 days

After the renewal grace period, you have a certain number of days to restore the domain for another year. After that time, it becomes available to the public for registration.

For more details about price, go to the price section above. Availability wait period 35 days When a domain is deleted, you must wait a certain number of days before the domain is available to the public for registration.