Your domain name is the address where customers find you and the part after the @ in your email address. The extension (.ro, .com or another) is chosen once and stays with you for years, so it's worth five minutes of thought.
In short
- If you sell or work mainly in Romania, a .ro is the natural choice.
- If you have customers in several countries or an international product, .com is more neutral.
- If you can, get both and point one to the other: it protects your name.
- Prices at NBT Host: .ro €10 per year, .com €16 per year, and the same at renewal.
.ro: the country-code domain
.ro is Romania's country-code domain, managed by ROTLD. To a customer in Romania, it signals right away that the business is local. For search engines, a country-code domain is a signal that the website targets an audience in that country; Google says so explicitly in its documentation for multi-regional sites.
A good fit for: local businesses, medical and professional practices, trades, stores that deliver within Romania, Romanian institutions and associations.
.com: the generic domain
.com is the best-known generic extension and isn't tied to any country. For an international audience it's the neutral choice; to Google, a generic domain says nothing about the country, and the target audience is inferred from the content, the language and other signals.
A good fit for: businesses that work with customers in several countries, digital products, brands that want to grow beyond Romania.
Does it matter for SEO?
Less than people think. The extension alone won't lift you in the results; what matters is the content, speed, links to the website and how well the page answers what people are searching for. The difference shows up in geographic targeting: a .ro helps a little when your audience is in Romania and can hold you back a little when you want to reach another country.
If you choose a .com and your audience is in Romania, write the content in Romanian, show your business's Romanian address and phone number, and use the correct language tags. It will work very well that way too.
How to choose the name
A few common-sense rules that apply to any extension:
- short and easy to spell out over the phone, with no doubled letters that are hard to hear;
- no accented letters: names with diacritics (such as the Romanian special letters) complicate email and typing;
- hyphens in moderation: one is acceptable, more get forgotten;
- check trademarks: a name too close to another company's can cause problems.
Why get both
If someone registers the version you didn't take, they can use it for a website that looks like yours, or offer it to you later at a much higher price. With .ro and .com together, you pay €26 per year at NBT Host. Set up the second one as an alias or a redirect to the first, so Google sees a single address; the steps are in the guide on subdomains and additional domains.
Whose name it's registered in
The domain should be registered in your name or your company's name, not in the name of whoever built your website. At NBT Host, domains are registered in the customer's name, through an accredited registrar. How to register a new domain: the registration guide. If you already have it with another company and want to move it: transferring a domain.
All available extensions and their prices are on the domains page.