.co.uk tends to be cheaper and says 'I'm in the UK'. But you need to have an address which will accept mail - if it does not and Nominet (the people in charge of .uk domains) decide to send something to you which is returned to them, they'll take the domain away.

.com doesn't need an address. But it costs a bit more and, if the US government or courts decide that they don't like having prostitution advertised, they can take the domain away from you - see what they've been doing in relation to domains accused of piracy.

If there's an address you can use, I'd go for .co.uk.

Oh, and Nominet also want a real name.. Of course you can write whatever you want in the name and address fields when you register the domain and hope you won't ever get bothered by them...

I think this is what xw5 means regarding the "you need to have an address" point he made regarding a .co.uk domain? You need to basically give a real name and address when you register a .co.uk which cannot really be hidden from public view in any effective way. Of course, you can pop in a not-quite-real name and address but then Nominet might do an intrusive little check on you and, if you fail to prove to them that your not-so-real name and address are yours then they can take your domain away.

But you can, of course, just hope this never occurs. I think that's what most of us do! (Or get a .com and pay for "private registration" to hide your real personal details from public view on WHOIS.com, then hope the US government keeps their stupid nose out of your business, too. Honestly - don't they have more important things to do? )

I think a third option is having a professional webmaster register your stuff for you, so you pay them for your domain and they have it registered to their own business name. This will likely cost a little extra because they'll also be managing your domain, i.e. dealing with any problems that crop up, but should only cost a few extra pounds.

you could get a accomodation address / mail box address but that was years ago

trouble with webmasters owning your domain name is that should they decide to bugger off , drop dead or whatever  your domain name and businesss effectivly belongs to them as they bought the domain name in there name /address if you see what i mean
so if you have spent ages building up your identity on teh web you can lose all that and have to start again and while its not the end of the world its definatly a pain in the ass

 

Yep but SEO wise does it make any difference?