Picking A Domain Name
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Anyone who has recently gone through the process of naming a company surely knows the pain involved in picking a domain (and thus, picking the company name). The dot-com domain has been picked over for 22 years (the first purchase was Sympolics.com back in March 1985) and thanks to real businesses and domain squaters, there are few viable names left unregistered. What’s more, the domain squaters are greedier than ever (lowest ask I’ve seen was $30K). But the show must go on, and recently I’ve been going through a naming processes for my new company. While we came up with some decent names, we just couldn’t get the "natural" domain to go with it. As a result, we’ve been looking at non-dot-com domains (like .US, .IS, etc.). Personally I like these domains, but people I talk to are split about 50/50 as "love it" or "hate it" with the former describing it as avante garde and the latter as cumbersome and hard to remember. |
What do you think? You can cast your vote on the left and leave a comment below with your rationale.
Interestingly, I’ve found that registering non-dot-com, non-US domains is expensive and tough. For example, .IS (Iceland) costs $400 per year and .GE (former Soviet republic of Georgia) requires the domain be registered by a Georgian resident. I think it is a simple matter of time before businesses begin adopting non-dot-com domains en masse. There are a fixed number of dot-com domains and the need for more domains grows continuously. There’s probably money to be made in buying up non-dot-coms even though I’m sure squatters have already figured that out…