It sounds like a technical question. It is really a trust question, and the answer on this coast is almost always the same. The short version: for most businesses here, buy a .com. The reasons why are not entirely obvious, and one of them is a hard technical restriction that catches people out.
What a .es is, and who can hold one
A .es is Spain's country code domain, run by Red.es. It reads as local and official, and the registry is not as open as the generic ones. To hold a .es you generally need to be a Spanish resident or a Spanish legal entity — which rules out a great many of the people who actually own Spanish property and run Spanish businesses from abroad. If you cannot be the registrant, a .es is not an option however much you would like one, and the domain cannot simply be bought through a designer with an address in Spain.
What .com gives you instead
- No eligibility check, no registrant requirements, no proof-of-residency documents
- Instant registration, and it can be moved to any registrar in the world in an afternoon
- It is what an international customer types, and it looks less local in a way that costs you trust
- It travels with the business if you expand beyond Spain later
- Roughly the same annual cost — usually €10 to €20 a year, more for a multi-word name
Our advice for most businesses on this coast
If you serve customers in Germany, the Netherlands or anywhere outside Spain, .com is the answer. It is the domain people in other countries have typed a thousand times and it carries no information about where you are. A .es does not make you more Spanish to someone reading in Dutch, and it can quietly restrict who is allowed to own your web address later if the business structure changes.
Where you do have a claim on a .es — a Spanish company, a Spanish sole trader, a practice registered here — it still is not usually the best primary domain. Register it, redirect it to your .com, and you have covered the ground without making it the address your customers see.
Check these before you commit to a name
- Whether the name is already taken in a way that matters — not just the .com but the .es and the social handles
- Whether the trade mark is somebody else's, which is a fight you do not want to have
- Who the registrant will be, and make sure the details you enter are accurate
- Whether your registrar keeps your contact details public in a whois lookup, and what that exposes
- What happens to the domain if you stop using the designer who bought it — which is why we register it in your name
One last practical point. Where you register decides who emails you when something goes wrong. A registrar you can telephone, in your own time zone, with a Spanish address on the invoice, is worth a euro or two a year. The cheapest registrar in the world is a nuisance for the eleven months of the year when nothing is wrong.